i would say the biggest problem with the large amount of royals and retainers is the fact it comes at the cost of more "random" characters that join you and how you recruit characters. The amount of optional characters become less and thus less effort on the map to recruit them. Basic goals in the old games like keeping a green unit alive , getting to a village before it's destroyed to get a character or doing certain things to have a character appear are much less likely to happen or made much easier. Also. "Random" characters tend to have a different loyalties and view on things compared to a retainer. Pretty much setting them apart more.
The chapter a character is introduced is their one big sales pitch moment. This is why retainers appear lacking. Their join chapter is inevetably focused on their lord and not on them. We don't get their strong character pitch. And without this, players are much less incentivized to use them and without use you won't unlock supports which would give further characterization.
This isn’t necessarily always the case. Celine’s got Celica in her join chapter which helps her yes but Louis and Chloe shine just as much if not more there. Timera looks easily the worst of her group unless you actively go out of your way to prepare another forged lance for her or significantly hinder the effectiveness of one of your lance units by giving timera their weapon. Alfred doesn’t exactly look good when he joins either ( none of his squad does admittedly but if I had to pick anyone etie looks the best by one shotting fliers). Pandreo easily looks the best on his join map since rosado doesn’t have the magic bow yet. I’d say it’s about even which lords look better initially then their retainers
@@ultimaterecoil1136 You're having a completely different conversation from what they're having. They're talking about characterization, you're talking entirely about gameplay.
That's definitely true in Engage. Meanwhile in Fates, you'd have some retainers join before their lord because the siblings of Corrin still had to do things elsewhere but wanted to make sure Corrin had backup. Oh, and some of the "have Corrin talk to the new recruits" scenes if you put them next to each other on the map at least gave you a sense of their personality but without some nonsensical scene like the meat song before Timarra joined. "It's a battle, Xander told us to find you and help and we were just in time, talk more later?" That works so much better because you really don't have the luxury of chatting while in a literal battlefield.
@@Vanessomaticone of the things that fates did right is give the retainers and other characters enough dialogue where you can figure out how they are personality wise
This. For me I completely skipped characters because I didn’t know a lot about them since the dialogue wasn’t well establish in the main story to give me an idea on how these characters are personality wise. For me I think the biggest offender when it comes to not knowing the characters are ivy retainers kagetsu and zeklov (seriously the only dialogue these characters do is kagetsu saying a generic we must help them and complementing a ring and zeklov just help stealing a ring with no establishment on how they behave) what’s worse is they don’t even get a cutscene at the end of the escape mission where you can figure out how their personality is really like at the end of the chapter because it only focuses on ivy and the main lords. And even as enemies it’s the generic of them being loyal to their lord so not much of an idea in how they really are. It sucks how the only way you will learn more about a lot of characters is the supports and even then depending on who supports you get it can either help establish or you get too much of their “quirk” (Celine obsesión with tea, Chloe fairy tails, friendship, etc) Funny enough I think fates did a good enough balance. The retainers don’t play a big role however with just a few dialogue before the battle starts the characters do get a chance to show their personality so you have an idea on how they behave and the chapter usually helps with them showing off their skills (more of the characters should’ve had a yunaka like chapter where they get to shine and show off their playstyle and feel relevant enough to be in the game since many characters just join cause the divine dragon or the lord says let’s join alear)
Awakening is interesting. Frederick is both Chrom's and Lissa's retainer, when IS could have added one for Lissa. Emmeryn's does not join the player and instead dies in the line of duty. Basilio's (Lon'qu) is relieved from his duties while Flavia's guards the border and does not join your army. Another 10 points for Awakening being a masterpiece
I... guess you could say Lon'qu is Basilios retainer, but tbh the story never portrays him as such, he's Basilios "champion" for the tournament to decide the Khan, which feels more like he's a gladiator Basilio "owns", imo, even if there's no slavery involved like with Roman gladiators. In the first place, with how Regna Ferox is a "nation of warriors", even more so than Brodia, I feel like the concept of "retainers" is superfluous in their culture in the first place. As for Lissa... you could say Maribelle kinda fills the position of a retainer? Kinda like how Rosado and Goldmary in Engage also aren't "officially" Hortensias retainers, they see themselves in a similar vein. Aside from that, I'd assume she WOULD have her own guardian assigned... if she wasn't already always around Chrom anyways, so Em trusts Chrom to have an eye on Lissa, while Frederick guards Chrom and thus is indirectly also assigned to Lissa.
Masterpiece is a stretch. But your point still stands. Awakening (unless you count Echoes) was the last game where you didn't constantly have the same system of recruiting allies in packs of 3.
@@ResurgentRaven Ironically, Three Houses (plus Three Hopes) is the only post-Awakening game that lacks this "package deal of three units" system. Though yes, SoV gets credit for not insisting on its sets of three needing to feature two retainers and their 'employer'.
And Awakenign have the courage to have characters you CAN miss. In my first playtrough I killed Gaius, because I dont know that I can recruit him, for example.
The Fates retainers I actually liked because they had their moments, and because there were quite a few non-retainer characters as well. Sure, you had Selena and Beruka, but a couple of chapter later you got Charlotte and Benny. For Hana and Subaki, you get Hayato and Rinkah. Not to mention Kaden and Keaton both are characters not even allied to your nation that join you. That makes for more variety. During Engage’s promo when they revealed all characters one by one, I grew so tired to read “this character is [insert lord]’s retainer, but they also have this one character trope they fill!” When Bunet and Pandreo were revealed I was like “oh cool, a chef and a priest that must make for some interesting storytelling” only to then find out they were Fogado’s retainers was a bummer. Ironically, Fogado and his relationship to his retainers is actually one of my favorites in the game. Off the top of my head, Yunaka is the only non-retainer, non-lord that joins your army until you get Veyle all the way at the end. That’s way too many in an already one-note cast. The overflow of retainers in Engage is one of my biggest complaints of that game lmao, I really hope they remedy this in the next game. Or at least make them like Hubert or Dedue where they have very heavily explored reasons for being the way they are.
I think you forgot About Seadal. The dancer of engage. And Lindon, the old guy you find on the boat chapter near the end. I think Saphir was king morions retainer so that makes only 4 characters who aren't a retainer or royal in some form.
@@ladyyoruichichan9006 They're still a minority which is the point and main problem. FE is developing this problem with, bizarrely enough... this need for "country equality"?, especially in Engage, where every single country MUST have 2 lords, each with 2 retainers. (Jade and Amber both fill this role for Diamante by design, even if they join at different times and for different reasons). Hell, Brodia's royals are all guys while Ilusia's royals are all girls for "balance", and Firene and Solm are counterparts in how their royals work, with the crown prince and crown princess being male and female respectively. It's so... irritating with the "synergy", it takes me out of the story with how "orderly" and "perfect" it is. Solm, Firene's royals, and Ilusia's characters' supports were probably some of the best aspects of Engage. Engage honestly is heavily reminiscent of Fates, the story is garbage, the avatar is honestly worse than Corrin (I just did not care about them half of the time because of how "safe" they are, compared to the Three Houses trio, I didn't even remember their "character moment" scenes tbh after I finished the game), Lumera is sadly "dead parented" again. An anniversary game absolutely should not be spent rehashing the same plots and the worst aspects of a series, because "the other games did them". Anniversary games should be showcasing what the series PEAK is (aka good characters, good story, good gameplay, etc). What we got was typical lazy writing from the same studio behind Fates. (Also I'm not ignoring how Engage was also heavily localized, they were also pulling Fates-tier controversies again in the Japanese version, Nintendo was smart enough to change S supports to bond ring supports since Celine is 17 and they foresaw that being a problem.)
And, in a game like Fates, the retainers are actually usable. Effie is probably the best armor knight in the series- unlike Louis, she doesn't fall off.
I really think the bigger problem is having a self insert that is expected to be able to bang everyone on the roster, it severely limits how the entire roster looks and age and such
Did it tho? Alear couldn't marry everyone, they just gave their most treasured person a ring. We had old guys and gals and a child soldier in Anna, so i dunno what ages are missing. Also it's better without child soldiers anyway
@@boshman11 We had multiple child-soldiers even. At the very least Jean alongside Anna, and then depending on what age you assign to Hortensia and perhaps Celine. In contrast we had like 3 old people in Vander, Lindon and Saphir, a bunch of characters probably around their mid- to late 20s, I feel like Mauvier, Zelkov and perhaps Bunet are the only ones that really feel like they could be over 30 and be more "middle-aged men".
@@Justic_ oh true forgot about Jean and Hortensia. Celine obviously not though cuz she's the political leader of the country and wise and hardened etc. I also want more older characters, too. Saphir and Mauvier and Zelkov and Lindon were among the best in Engage, and the game coulda benefited from some more characters like em. But that was more because of Engage's weird artstyle and design decisions, I feel.
It also didn’t help that the supports essentially were meaningless since only alear ending changes and it’s still pretty generic . Not to mention how grinding it was to raise the support and depending on the support will either give you information that develop the characters or you get more of their gimmick personality which could make players not want to learn more about the character (I skipped Celine because I got to many supports when it looks like she was a tea addict I know why she does this however waiting for the A support takes too long. Her and alfred real reason should’ve been part of the main story and not hidden behind the support since it would explain why Alfred is behaving like that)
Funny thing is, Fates seemed like it got retainers 'right' to the extent that it used a lot of them. They weren't always introduced as "here's a prince(ss) and their two sidekicks"; the retainers were often recruited, or at least encountered, while they were off doing things for their liege. Some of them were doing things *they* decided their liege would need done, or where doing it "my way", or had other minor disagreements.
One thing about Retainers in a game such as Fates is that a lot of the retainers join at way earlier points than their liege. Think of how Lazlow and Peri get a scene to themselves where they fend off Ryoma of all people without Xander being in sight. It was still a slight problem, but not as glaring as when retainers often join in Engage with maybe one line of dialogue while their liege is the focus of the scene. Characters in Engage generally just have such non introductions its nutty.
You also only have 4 siblings. Even counting Felicia and Jakob that's 10 retainers per route. In Engage there are 10 royals, so 20 retainers. 30 unit slots that are nobility. 22 counting clanne and framme. 24 if you count saphir and lindon, who are ex retainers of the dead kings. 25 if you consider mauvier a retainer. Essentially 90% of your army is nobility. It doesn't help that there's so little world building in the story which really doesn't help the characters be interesting when most of their deal is their position in their vague society.
You also tend to get them in fates at the exact points you need them, especially conquest, which gives them more impact. Arthur and Effie showing up just as you're about to feel overwhelmed, Niles and Odin making the whole chapter much more manageable. Only Selena and Beruka show up with their lord here, but you need ALL of them for that chapter so they show their worth
Ironically asides from Alcryst, Celine and Diamant I dropped the lords and used their retainers more often than not. they just seemed more interesting than their Lords most off the time.
I think so too. But being the bodyguard of one specific noble, they would constantly say their lord's name. Which just limit their character in my opinion.
I think it's a very funny coincidence that in my current Engage run I've benched the three lords you mentioned but I'm using one of each of their retainers. Being Citrinne, Chloé and Amber.
I really hate how the retainers are implemented in the main story. Even in awakening and fates they may not have played a major role however you got enough information to figure out their personality about the character and usually the chapter gives you enough time to learn about them. Most of engage retainers don’t get that opportunity since they either waste it for the divine dragon or it’s very poorly implemented (kagetsu and zelkov only have 2 lines when you see them and it’s not even about themselves it’s just them wanting to do the generic help the main character)
I miss individual characters.... or characters that would come up in pairs like Lute and Arthur idk One of Engage biggest problems is that there would be so much potential in random characters (Yunaka, the dancer, Saphir, Lindon) but they are so isolated that they are forgotten (except for papaya girl)
Retainers could a trope that's played with. The retainer serves heir lord but not necessarily you, but what we usually get instead is a crutch narratively
its so odd to me how engage focuses so much lens and characters on the non-alear lords, but then just stops caring about them. ivy, alfred, timerra, and diamant pretty much just stop appearing in 95% of cutscenes halfway through the game, and every cutscene from there on is about veyle and the four hounds. its one of the many factors that makes engage feel so lifeless to me. at least fates bothered to give its characters screentime
Tbf three houses suffers of thr same thing. Outside the main lords, the other students don't do anything in the main story, outside hubert. Even dedue is pretty meaningless in azure moon.
@@mihaimercenarul7467 sadly it's because for some reason Dedue can die so they have to write every scene as if he could have died in any one of them making him just as generic as every other student while someone who is probably one of the least popular unit (Gilbert) is written as a replacement for dedue and seteth and he isn't even that memorable. Aside from being a bad dad
@@mihaimercenarul7467also, i said the issue was engage's main lords not having screentime, which makes giving them retainers feel pointless. 3h does not suffer that at all, as its main lords are extremely prominent in every cutscene of their path
Ive been struggling to get through Engage and it boils down to just not caring about the characters. As you said, they don’t have any personal motivations or anything to connect to. Even the lords themselves feel like empty vessels that are just there to spew on about how awesome the divine dragon is.
So I took a few notes as I watched this. We can agree to disagree, but here's my take. -I'll argue that Alm doesn't have retainers. His friends are exactly that-friends. All of them join the Deliverance for different reasons (excluding Faye, who's in love with Alm). -Being a retainer does not entirely mean there isn't room for character growth. These characters work fundamentally as supporting characters-they're not the main focus of the game. It doesn't mean there can't be retainers with depth and intrigue, but remember that Engage specifically focuses on Alear. -Young retainers aren't bad by nature. Supports work well for several of them and provide important depth to them. For example, Citrinne has a very unique support with Yunaka, Pandreo and Panette both have family issues that motivated them to being retainers, Kagetsu wants to see the outside world and constantly challenge himself (evident in his supports), and Jade, Bunet and Rosado all want to fucus on their respective talents. -I agree that retainers do pose a problem recruitment wise. Considering how older FE has you recruiting enemies, spending money on mercenaries, meeting specific conditions to recruit them, and rare units with all of the above, Engage having a Noble + Retainer model hurts. It hurts even more since you only have a few ally recruits and a single enemy one. -So Three Houses. The only real retainers are Hubert, who comes from an undying family of loyalty to Edelgard, and Dedue, who owes his life to Dimitri and the only person he's grown to genuinely respect. Everyone else has their own motivations and goals outside of the main lord. You even have some such as Lorenz and Felix who actively go against the grain and question the main lord (Felix more notably.) All of this was brought up though. -I'll say just about nobody really dares to push back in Engage. Not a single retainer questions the decisions or actions their respective lord makes. -As for why they use retainers more commonly, I couldn't say but I can take guesses. They definitely do learn from some mistakes, with Engage looking really well, a fun combat system, but as for characters, I'd say the reason they do this more often is because it's safe. What's easier; unorthodox recruitment methods, paying for certain characters to join, meeting conditions, route splits? Or having a royal and their buddies join? IS went with the latter, with only few exceptions for Engage. It's a choice I don't agree with since I love recruiting people and feeling like I earned it. It's fun recruiting someone like Xavier, who has the hardest conditions in FE history-it's fun recruiting someone like Stefan, who randomly shows up with no warning and has impressive stats. It's fun recruiting enemies like Cormag or Dussel who have a change of heart, whenever it be their morals are challenged or because something happens in game that changes them. Retainers are fine when they're done right, but I heavily prefer the older games where you had to recruit stronger units.
As for your point on why they are using retainers more commonly, at least one of the reasons I can think of is because this is an anniversary game, so this is a call back to the Fate Royalties having 2 retainers each.
One thing I have a problem with 3H is that first time Playthrough on any person that is on the switch is that it is basically Impossible to recruit a character. You basically have to hope you get the flowers and the best gifts to the student you want early game and at the right professer level makes it easier. The new players are going to boost those stats and get no response from them joining only getting the One Student (unless you chose Church of Seros) [since you are most likely to do Romance with the House Leader because of the trailers and choosing the gender based off of that] My first time I chose Black Eagles and only was able to recruit One Student Lysithia.
I would honestly argue Three Houses has exactly _TWO_ retainers: Hubert and Dedue. Everyone else can be recruited away from their house, so pulling them away from whoever they'd theoretically be a retainer for isn't off the table, which I'd argue disqualifies them from retainer status. This, incidentally, makes Hilda some sort of antiretainer for Edelgard, as Crimson Flower is the only route in which Hilda cannot be recruited, due to being unable to deal with Edelgard's authoritative nature. I suppose I could be convinced that Gilbert becomes a retainer for Dimitri, since he's exclusive to Azure Moon, but I haven't finished that route yet and I honestly don't know if I ever will, Dimitri just does not interest me as a character.
Some extra detail that might be important is that 3h was functionally my first Fire Emblem, so those two pretty much defined my expectations for a retainer character- their entire life revolves around their lord, they absolutely will die and kill for them, and they cannot _under any circumstances_ be pulled away from them. I can't really say that _Any_ unit in Awakening met those expectations, with the closest being _Tharja's_ yandere ass who I want nowhere close to me, and I haven't played Fates yet.
I think that's why 3H gets away with it - there's less retainers in general, and those who are more restrictive in their recruitment have very solid characterisation to explain why. Dedue has a much more involved reason to be loyal to his lord than Lapis or Hana for example, and even units like Catherine or Hilda are more understandable in terms of their restriction a bit.
@@StarshadowMelody Frederick? Literally has a nickname? Dude who clears out friggin pebbles for his liege? You're saying you didn't get that from Frederick? I can understand the rest of the cast, but Frederick definitely would die for the sake of Chrom and Lissa.
Those retainers were far more likeable than alcryst atleast. Engage was a tire fire of bad though relative to past games. I'll probably have a wait and see attitude when the next game releases
No but seriously. Engage kept shooting groups of 3 recruits at you so fast, I couldn't even keep up, and at least on hard mode, there was no good way to go back and train the weaker units, so my bench just got bigger and bigger. Some of the retainers are really great (Pandreo and Panette were easily my best characters, and actually really cool in their supports), but SO many of them are just "I sure do love my liege and have very little personality outside of that!!!". Individually they were a little more interesting than the Fates retainers were to me, but you brought up a good point in saying that the Fates retainers at least helped flesh their liege out better. Solid video! Subbed, definitely gonna watch more!
I think you've missed the forest for the trees here: imo the number of retainers is only a symptom of a greater problem; the number of lords. Most older FE games have one lord per path (or one lord full stop). Birthright and Conquest have five (four if you don't count Corrin, six if you count Azura) while Revelation and Engage have nine. Making time to introduce all of these characters is narratively costly and introducing other characters as their retainers is an easy way of making up for that. Unfortunately it causes the problems that you mentioned in the video (although I think you overstate how much worse the motivation of a retainer is on average than a non-retainer). I think someone at IS has come to the conclusion that more countries with more lords is more complicated and thus better when this isn't really the truth and FE would be well served with a plot with a single country as the perspective. Three houses doesn't really fall into this imo, just because its narrative structure is so different to most FE games, especially when it comes to recruitment. I didn't feel like any of the problems exhibited with retainers were exhibited there.
tbf, we had many "lords"/royals before in Fire Emblem already. FE1/11 had Minerva and Hardin, both royals of their respective country, and with a group that could be considered their retainers, and Caeda as princess of her small island-nation, who potentially has Ogma as retainer. You could even count Tiki as princess of the Manaketes/Divine Dragons. FE3/12 makes Hardin an antagonist, instead you get Sheena. In FE4 you have all the different houses, you have Quan, you have Edain(later also Brigid), you have Jamke, Ayra, Lachesis (and while Eldigan doesn't join you, you get his son Ares in Gen 2), you have Lewyn, Claud... royals and nobles all around, for the most part. Most of these do get carried into Gen 2 as well! On a lower scale, there's a decent amount of local minor nobles joining Leif in FE5 as well. FE6, you have Lilina, you have Zelot, you have technically at least Sue, even if you don't recruit her grandpa, you have Elffin depending on your path and then, royal or noble, all the big Etrurian generals join you. FE8 is a big example for this, Tana and Innes, Joshua, L'Arachel, if Lyon wasn't the antagonist he'd probably join you as well! I mean, FE9 and 10 are also largely about the political intrigue on the continent as well, so most of the royals join you here as well, Elincia, the Laguz-royals of all the tribes, Sanaki, depending on how you see it Pelleas... Awakening also has a nice selection considering there's only really 4 "countries", in addition to Chrom and Lissa for Ylisse, both Khans of Regna Ferox join their army (although only late-game, but still play a role from very early on regardless), Say'ri as princess of Chon'sin, which is honestly her less important title compared to her role as leader of the resistance against Walhart, Tiki is back, and then there's of course the revelation about Robin that you could count, not to mention the various Spot-Pass characters which technically only get unlocked right before the final boss, but still all are characters that play a big role in the games story... sans Priam. You may also count Maribelle as a big noble, if we move from just the theme of "royalty" to the more general "nobility", as well as Panne as last representative of her entire race. Even Virion, small his role may be, but still, the first one to really notify you of the Valmese invasion and of course it'd be from a Valmese noble in hiding. Fire Emblem ALWAYS put most of the narrative focus on royals and nobility, that's nothing really new, Fates is just one of the cases where they stopped hiding it, and of course the biggest case since the series got big in the west, with the most noteable titles before being Blazing Sword and Awakening, who are for the most part relatively light or discreet about that compared to most of the other games, to which Fates is of course quite the contrast.
I think in engage specifically both are a problem I don’t really have with any other game. The series generally relies too much on royal MCs, but the amount is a separate issue. With Fates, the conflict is based around two nations at war and the families involved with them, so having multiple royals isn’t too bad. The retainers get a bit old but there’s a lot of other characters thanks to the kids. Revelations may have a lot of royals and retainers but it’s also just in general has a comically oversized roster due to combing two full separate games, something Houses remedies by only having enough characters for one game and making almost all but 8 just potential recruits. Engage is just royals and retainers though. Fates had some variety with the kids, but… Jade, Jean, Anna, the old guy, Yunaka, Mauvier, and the old lady are the only characters I can think of who aren’t royals, retainers, Alear, or Alear’s retainers. Thats 7 of like 40 characters. And all royals and retainers being recruited the exact same way just makes it tedious. On top of that, there’s just no reason for engage’s story to focus so much on royals. Houses and Awakening have a few who leads the armies, and Fates has the family focus be a large part of the story. Engage you’re a religious figure and deity, so there’s no need for royals to be involved with leading the army, but the game is all royals and retainers anyway.
@@mr.stuffdoer8483 It's actually worse numerically than you've said: Jade is Diamant's retainer, Mauvier is Veyle's retainer and Lindon and Saphir are both retainers to dead royals (although you forgot Seadal) so the breakdown in the base game is: Dragons: 2 Dragon Retainers: 4 Royals: 8 Royal Retainers: 16 Retainer of a dead and hence non-playable royal: 2 Other: 4 But yeah I agree with basically everything you've said.
@ I think a major part of engage’s issues with these is that it’s: 1. Here’s your god self insert and your buds 2. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission 3. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission 4. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission 5. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission 6. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission 7. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission 8. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission 9. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission So the others, while technically retainers, aren’t quite as obnoxiously repetitive.
@@Justic_ I think the issue is not the number of royals or nobles but really the number of lords (the archetype) and there is far less lords except in Fates and Engage : 1-2 in BB, 3 in bs, 2 in SS, 1 in PoR, 3-4 in RD, 3 in awakening, 10 in fates, 2 in SoV, 4 in 3H (but 2 at most in each run) and 9 in Engage, there is clearly too much characters taking the role of Lord in Fates and Engage.
I think one of the biggest problem's with Engage's retainers compared to Fate's is the join time. With the exception of Rosado and Goldmary, every other retainer pair joins alongside their lord, and since the story is more focused on the lords, the retainers get less time to make their important first impression. Even Rosado and Goldmary still have multiple chapters where theyre fighting alongside hortensia, and talk almost exclusively about saving hortensia when they do join Fates on the other hand, has more retainers stagger their join times, Odin and Niles join before Leo, and same with Saizo and Kagero in Fates. Sure some lords still show up with their retainers like Hinoka and Camilla, but on the whole more of the retainers get their own shot in the spotlight. Fates's recruitments still sure as hell arent perfect, the retainers still are forced to show up in pairs with or without their lord besides Kagero, but even just the MINIMAL staggering the retainers have gives them more time to flesh themselves out
"Why are you fighting in my army?" "Because the person who signs my paycheck told me to." I don't see how that is a problem, in war, outside of conscription, is the reason people fight in wars
Yeah it's realistic but also boring. The main issue with retainers is that they feel more like hangers on for their lord, not their own character with motivations and goals outside of "my boss is here."
In all honesty though, I've very rarely seen that kind of blunt response in an FE game. If a character actually used that, they'd probably be a number 1 character day 1.
Idk I find invasion, going for glory, romantic interest just as if not more compelling. Like most of Fe1's cast is in the war cause it directly impacts them and their loved ones. Or in SoV's case most of the deliverance is fighting because they have to or want to, not just cause their boss is taking them to war. And with celica there's lots of interesting character motivations like with Valbar + Leon for example. Honestly I'd argue that most people go to war either cause of some intrinsic motivation or out of literal necessity for survival.
Retainers do not work for me either, although I will say that if they do not join at the same time as the lord they serve it helps their cause a fair bit. But more than that I really miss the idea of walking up a valley and finding a weirdo living the hermit life and them just... Joining the fight for no particular (apparent) reason. Bishop Renault was absolute peak Fire Emblem, and I have yet to find better.
Weird... I kept Kagetsu and Zelkov, dropped Ivy I kept rosado and goldmary, dropped hortensia Kept Amber and Jade, dropped Diamant Kept Lapis and citrinne, ditched Alcryst Kept etie and boucheron, ditched Alfred Kept Louis and Chloé, dropped Celine Obviously I couldn't deployed all those ppl, so I would alternate quite a lot
I feel like if Royal characters didn’t have retainers though, it wouldn’t really make sense. If someone like Alfred, who is secretly very sick, was running around without protection, Firene would lose their Prince very quickly. The thing that I think fire emblem needs to emphasize is that retainers serve/protect their liege. “Bunet is only here because Fogado is. Merrin is only here because Timerra is” yeah, because their job is to protect them. I’m not saying you don’t have a point, but I think taking out retainers completely just wouldn’t make sense
Agreed: A lord's retainers fight for YOU because their lord does. That's completely fine, as long as their lord fighting for you isn't the reason why they fight AT ALL. And it applies to most retainers in Engage.
tbf, past games also managed to do retainers, but in a way that made more sense/felt more natural than Fates and Engages. Of course there's Marth with his group of cavs, but Hardin also's got a group of them, his wolves or what they were called were basically his retainers. Minervas White Wings. Even Nyna I'm pretty sure had a retainer in Midia iirc... and perhaps the other knights that were locked up with her, although I'm pretty sure they were just Archanean soldiers while Midia actually was part of Nynas personal guard. Quan had Finn, Edain had Midir, Lachesis has her 3 NPC-knights. Eliwood of course had his cavs, again, but in Hectors case I'm pretty sure Oswin fills that spot. You could also say that Harken was one of Eliwoods fathers retainers. Dozla for L'Arachel should be THE most obvious case, tbh. I guess you could also consider Orson along with Forde and Kyle as Ephraims retainers. Lucia and Geoffrey DEFINITELY fill that role for Elincia as well, in both PoR and RD, more so than Ike. Awakening obviously has Frederick, but indirectly you could also consider the entirety of the Shepherds as Chroms (and Lissas) retainers. All of them are royals and nobles with retainers, but they manage to implement them more naturally than Engage does theirs... and I'm pretty sure for the most part it's because they're mostly proper military, proper knights, which... a few retainers in Engage may call themselves as such, but on a closer look aren't, they're not even knights in-training, they're simply strong fighters that have been picked off the street and assigned to protect their respective lord... which sounds more like a mercenary than a properly assigned retainer. And just in general, there's nothing wrong with a mercenary becoming a royals retainer, that's basically what was the case with Harken after all, but a) aren't most of the retainers in Engage even former mercenaries or something of the sort and b) does this not really work when it applies to basically 90% of all retainers in the game. It works the best with Timerra, probably, since she's generally portrayed to be a free spirit, so her just picking up people she thinks are strong and having them become her retainer checks out, but how are Ivys retainers a basically even more wild selection?! A disgraced noble(?) who seems to have fallen to thievery and a wandering, foreign swordmaster, both of which basically have no actual relationship with Ivy AT ALL at the time she joins Alears army beyond being her retainers.
Most of those should’ve been part of the main story not hidden behind the supports. Especially since many time the supports were not that engaging and most of the time the characters are stuck with their obsession unless you pair them correctly like Alfred and Celine otherwise you get a lot of support Alfred obsessing over muscles or Celine tea
I mean, 3H has Dedue, Hubert, Cyril and Catherine, but the narrative justification is what made them interesting--they're not as gimmicky. Dedue connects to Dimitri's past/Duscur/Dimitri's MAIN MOTIVE, Hubert has been raised as the empress's shadowed hand, Cyril was saved from a war zone and slavery by Rhea, and Catherine would have been killed without Rhea intervening.
Lords are generally inexperienced and very principled so having someone to advise them is important, especially for areas they're lacking in. Ike is a blank slate for a large portion of 9. Soren and Titania fufill the job of advising him and handling things he can't, like the overall bookkeeping of the company. Retainers work best when they do their job, are restricted to the lord and a very small number of plot relevant characters who aren't the main lord (7 does this with Marcus/Oswin being the retainer for the non-main lord well enough), or when they're not even units that can fight (the old dude in 11, Merlinus in 6, Lewyn in 4). They also serve for exposition by reacting to whatever our naive and uneducated lord, and conduit for the player, might not be know the finer points of
One thing that I also dislike about the retainers is that they usually feel like they are lesser units compared to their royals. Like the royals get the dragon vein abilities in Fates or the unique classes in Engage. So the moment you get a royal and their retainer the retainer already feels overshadowed (granted some can still turn out to be great units, but the first impression is already kinda bad).
I think Engage was always meant as a celebration of the fire emblem franchise. So the story which seems half baked to most people, is actually just a bunch of fire emblem tropes all thrown together. So I think the retainers were a way to pad the cast in a game where the story is very simple. I don’t get the feeling that the retainers and amount of retainers will be a fixture in games going forward.
It’s worth mentioning that Corrin has FOUR retainers (from Nohr alone; six if you count their Hoshidan retainers of Kaze and Rinkah [Kaze is formally made Corrin’s retainer, but Rinkah is a bit less formal while similarly obvious]), not just two.
I mean as far as 3H goes I definitely wouldn't call all the students "sort of retainers". There are some examples as listed in the video, but a good chunk of the students had no real connection with their house lord at all before the academy. Blue Lions had the least there since the only ones not directly connected to Dimitri were Ashe, Mercedes and Annette, and in the latter's case there's an indirect connection anyway since she's the daughter of Gilbert who effectively becomes Dimitri's retainer in Part Two. Beyond that, Edelgard only really has Hubert since everyone else may have valid reasons for switching sides, and Claude doesn't really have any real retainers, not even Hilda really qualifies. At one point he tries to pretend Nader is one, and given his Almyran lineage it's probably not too inaccurate, but still. If you count Rhea as a lord though then a good chunk of the church staff can effectively count as retainers, especially Catherine. That said I hadn't really considered the problem Engage has with it before but I'm inclined to agree. When a character's only reason to even join your army is because their liege joins it doesn't give them much time to shine. Alear alone gets 3 retainers, every kingdom has 2 royals with 2 retainers each, and even Mauvier can count as Veyle's retainer, leaving only a pitiful 6 non-DLC characters who are neither lords or retainers to said lords, arguably 7 if you count Veyle since despite having a retainer of her own she isn't really a lord. Lastly, as for Ike's case, while the fact he isn't a noble does mean he doesn't actually have proper retainers, Soren might as well act as one since he's undyingly loyal to him even before he rose to leader of Greil's Mercenaries, acts as his strategist and tends to antagonize anyone who says anything negative about him.
honestly I think retainers can work well if done right, things that come to mind for me that include well written retainers are things such as Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms for example. Where even though a character may serve their lord and most often loyally, they still have their own ideals and motivations that shine through more than not.
You nailed my biggest complaint about retainers, I don't mind them if they're the starting crew ex. Christmas Cavaliers/Jagens but for every single royal in the game its a bit overkill. I miss the in-map recruitments, where it is a challenge to get to the unit before the enemy kills them, or you have to free them from a Jail cell and keep them alive, or you find a enemy unit that is sympathetic to the cause and they switch sides mid-battle. (I loved the capture mechanic in Fates, where you could capture/recruit unique enemies too...)I hope that Intelligent Systems stray away from the "everyone is a retainer", and get more into the rag-tag crew that could.
It’s not really a problem with retainers imo, as much as it is a problem with royals. Fates and Engage each give you 9 royals, including Corrin/Alear and not Azura/Veyle (in Revelations, 5 in Conquest and Birthright). And then each of those lords has two retainers. If every lord had two retainers but there were like one or two lords, that wouldn’t be a problem. But in Engage there are 9 lords, each with two retainers, so you suddenly have 18 retainers. That’s way too many. I don’t think lords having retainers is a problem, I think the sheer number of royal characters leads to an even larger number of retainers. If I’m not mistaken, there are 8 total characters that you can get in engage who aren’t royalty or retainers (counting stewards as retainers). Lindon, Saphir, Yunaka, Seadall, Jean, Anna, Veyle, and Mauvier. And honestly you could argue that Veyle is a royal and Mauvier is her retainer, I just listed them here cuz it’s a bit different. But that’s it. You have more characters who are lords or retainers by the time you leave Firene than you’ll get non-royals or retainers throughout the ENTIRE GAME. My point is, retainers aren’t the problem alone. It’s the number of retainers and royals that is becoming a problem
Well, part of the problem you presented is also the generally shrinking size of armies, Fates still had 68 characters total, roughly 45 when divided into Birthright and Conquest iirc, meanwhile Engage has half of that, 34. Having lords and their retainers take up 27 unit-slots wouldn't be as much of a problem when there's more than 50 units total, or heck, even more than 45 should do. Although I do think we definitely could cut down on the number of royals, why does every nation have to have the same number of royals, an older and a younger sibling? And why do both have to join your army? FE8 handled part of that pretty well, while you of course have Tana and Innes, somewhat mirroring Eirika and Ephraim as royal siblings of Renais, Joshua and L'Arachel are the only heirs to their kingdoms. Another step, as mentioned before, would be for a royal to have a sibling, but that sibling doesn't join the army, somewhat like Hector and Uther, or Emmeryn in Awakening (not counting Spot Pass). Granted, both of them die, but that doesn't have to be the case... kinda like Sanaki in FE9 as well, although she did of course become playable in FE10. Even in those cases, their retainers could still join the army, but they wouldn't necessarily add to the bloat.
Something else to keep in mind is that in fates, while there were too many retainers the retainers also pulled double duty. You might get one of the set then the other then the lord, or the lord might arrive and ask you to save the retainers, they were staggered. Also the larger cast size meant that padding the retainers with non affiliated green or res units or the rare enemy nation soldier like silas or mozu added lots of variety despite the cast being organized into 30 royal/retainer groupings. This is not the case in engage- while Celine joins and her retainers are a rescue mission, this is essentially a tutorial in the same mission. Every other recruit is “hi im a royal. Oh here are two blue units.” Unlike fates its always a three-for-one deal, no variety and no pacing
Another issue especially in terms of Engage feeding into the recruit creep is the fact that they constantly recruit the lord and retainer at the same time (every chapter pretty much you have new characters, and a lot of the time you can just replace an old character with someone who can do the same stuff but higher stats). It's less of a thing in awakening for instance, but in many of the games you can end up recruiting retainers (or retainer adjacent roles) in entirely different chapters (as they were stationed at a different location when x event happened kicking off the story, etc). An easy example of this recently would be in Fates, where quite often a royal may well have sent off their retainers to help you when they couldn't go themselves, leading to potentially having the retainers join BEFORE their respective royals (which makes sense, retainer isn't the same thing as bodyguard so sending off someone else to deal with what you can't is a major point of having retainers in the first place, since you can't do everything yourself).
It can’t be for “so they don’t miss their new favorite character” 2 of the most thirsted and loved by community characters in Awakening were Gaius and Tharja. Both of which were enemy recruits.
IMO the problem with retainers is their comparable weakness and their role - retainer is understood neither as a soldier in personal unit or anything, in Fire Emblem retainer serves as a personal bodyguard and champion. Here comes my problem - while I agree with your apprehensions of the story requiring more explanation to why they are there and kinda disagree with recruitment mechanic (as I don't care for battle/village recruitment) my question is WHY WOULD ANY ROYAL PLACE THEIR CHILDREN SECURITY IN THEIR HANDS AND WHY DO THEY STOP???!!! In most cases royal is superior in power to retainer and that leads to many players fielding royals without retainers later in the game. That makes no sense, why would a parent wanting their child to not die place their security in hands of people that effectively require their employer defending them? And even better, why would a character sworn to defend their lord allow said lord to go fight alone even ignoring lord's death afterwards? That, IMO, requires change in type of" 1) Make retainers stronger unit than royals or equal in power but wiith bonuses to all stats depending on how close they are to royal to encourage retainer actually defending said royal - this should 100% be implemented, give more impact to Dragon Veins, allow only royals to visit villages, remove healer classes and make staff a secondary weapon only royals can equip (you know, play on trope of divine justification to nobility etc), basically play around with the dynamic while making things logical. 2) Make it so that fielding a royal automatically fields their retainers too. Those people are sworn to defend royal so IMO they would simply not allow the royal to go out into the battle without them. Sure, let them fight without royals but not the other way around. 3) Punish the retainer for outliving the royal - unless it's a story death a retainer should be punished for failing at their job in some way, maybe a stat drop, maybe inability to give and receive support bonuses (let them form supports, just make gameplay consequences non-existent after royal dies), basically make it so that player would actually feel the need to risk them more than royals in ironman runs.
Or TL:DR - make retainers actually defend royals and not the other way around, force royals to join maps with all their living retainers, punish retainer in case royal dies so players risk retainer more than royal.
tbf, at least in Fire Emblems context it makes sense for the royals to be stronger than the retainers they generally employ to protect them, since in most FE-games, royalty does have some sort of "special bloodline" that is supposed to make them more special than commoners, like Holy Blood, Crests, generally just dragonic heritage... or in Engages case just "royal blood" with no more explanation what makes it so special...
@@Justic_ I know they are special, it's just that I hold to the opinion that uniqueness is better than sheer power - as I said previously, put more emphasis on dragon veins modifying map, make it so only royals can master white magic, hell, you can even make it so that royals buff all units of their nationality or something. Basically current type of royal blood makes it so that retainers have no point of existing since royal has to defend them.
Thank you! This is exactly how I feel about retainers in more recent games. In Fates it makes sense, after all the story is more personal about Corrin and his siblings, it makes sense most characters you recruit are Corrin's siblings and their siblings' closest people. But on Engage it feels more like a limitation. Especially on a continent where most people are devout to the divine dragon, the fact most people you recruit join just because their liege joins you feels like wasted potential. Hell, people like Amber, Jade or Pandreo could have easily join you like they already do in game without being retainers and they would have more room for character growth, since being retainers isn't even that relevant to their characters unlike other characters like Panette or Citrinne
I've got a very practical answer that I think ties into the points given in the video for why I don't see this trend changing: Fire Emblem Heroes. Retainers, as mentioned in the vid, are guaranteed units. Which means guaranteed exposure. You get a (hopefully) cool new lord, and two freebie faces that players might connect with. Three units' worth of exposure for the price of one! If even one of those characters gets popular with the player base, then maybe more people will pull for that character and their alts in Fire Emblem Heroes, thus printing more money for IS. And they don't even have to worry about one of the units being missed, or being a Green Unit that dies too easily. Plus, if the retainers aren't all grizzly old men or dumb mentors, they can be #Quirky and focus their writing on one character trait, all while looking spry and appealing. Even BETTER for marketing! It's no secret that Heroes makes phat stacks of money for Intelligent Systems. I strongly suspect they'll lean into a design philosophy with their main-game characters that makes Heroes even more profitable. I'll be curious to see if they do going forward.
With 3 Houses and spinoff 3 Hopes, the way they are build it is still easy to miss a lot in those games. Supports based around having certain characters fro different houses, and even having paralogues. The 3 houses route split, and 3 hopes changes around recruiting Byleth or not. The games are good for playig casual, but have lots of things to offer for the completionist
One other thing is the classes of said retainers For example, why would Diamant had an armor knight and a cavalier when is biggest weakness is magic? Elise and Sakura both have their best friend in a defensive role and a seasoned fighter too Hinoka has it the best, with a healer to tend her wounds and an archer to cover her back, similar to Fogado, except that their classes are an after thought and Bunet doesnt really show qualities of a knight in any way
Honestly, I much prefer using the retainers instead of the royals in Engage. The only royals I used in my playthrough were Celine and Ivy (though she was mostly a filler). It really bothers me that you get 3 recruits in a single recruitment, mandated by the story, and two of them are completely forgotten immediately after the chapter they join your party is completed, while the royals are present in almost every major cutscene. It is fine for the first few chapters, when you're still in the tutorial and your army is small, but by the time you reach Brodia you already have enough characters to start benching and the game throws 2 new royals and 3 new retainers with one recruitable to fill the role of DIamont's retainer. You haven't had enough time to get used to the new recruits, and the game is already giving you more and more units but not giving you time to spend with the ones it gave you in the previous chapter! And I'll be honest, the royals are not really good, neither in character design, concept or gameplay. They all have their unique class skills as royals, which you would be missing on immensely if you reclassed them so reclassing is better suited for the retainers. And they suffer a lot from Engage's piss poor story! -Alfred is as vanilla, cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill good mannered prince without any personality as it gets, and yet he's the royal that gets the most screen time! -Celine at least is interesting in the sense that she's both a mage and a swordswoman, making her prime candidate for the Levin Sword. Her choice in weapons hints to an interesting character, but unfortunately the story never does anything with her because she's a sub-royal character linked to Alfred! -Diamant is fine. He sucks in combat, but his design is okay and he is the voice of reason to contrast with his stupid suicidal father (who dies in vain because of his ego and makes things worse for the entire world). There's nothing interesting going on with him. -Alcryst is the most interesting of the royals so far, starting off as menacing and stoic, with the fun gag at his over-the-top dogeza when he realized his mistake. But instead of keeping this theme of two sides of the same coin, he just becomes the soft spoken background little brother that's too scared to speak up, again, because he's a sub-royal to Diamont! -Fogado and Timerra are the most interesting royals because the nobility of their country just is not interesting in ceremonies and other bullshit like that. They have a job to do, and after they do their job, they party with the people as equals! Too bad the story doesn't do anything with them either! -Ivy and Hortensia had the potential to be the most intriguing royals because of their shifting alliances, but they are not. Ivy shows up regretful that she has to fight but is willing to kill anyone standing in her way, bails and then is forced by her father to fight to the death which she fails at that as well. She does make a heroic rescue after her father dies, but all the intrigue of her character ends after the royals have a very small bickering about her being partially responsible for King Sombra's return and is never made interesting again. Hortensia was annoying during her introduction, remained annoying throughout all encounters you have with her, and after her brainwashing is undone, she immediately becomes irrelevant. Honestly, I wish Engage had made the enemies just pure evil so we could have spent that 15 minutes cutscene of the sexy dragon lady and the green haired masochist dying to better use with the actual characters in this narrative. Enagge is always trying to do something interesting at every turn, but never commits to anything and just drops all the narratives it hints at right after their introductions, and it is easily seen in the way the game treats the royal characters and their associated retainers.
I'm looking at the cast of playable units right now, not including DLC there are 36 units, only 6 of them are neither Royalty or a Retainer. Those units are Jean, Yunaka, Anna, Seadall, Lindon, and Saphir. Even then Lindon and Saphir are so closely tied to Royal characters that they're only a few steps removed from being Retainers anyway. It just makes the world feel way too small that the only people with names, faces and stories are those at the heights of society that all seem to know each other
I don't care about them being "younger" at all. They're meant to just be guards and peers for the person of royalty can get along with. I do not put Mentor type characters or characters the Royal has just met in the same category whatsoever. Cain and Abel are Marth's retainers, not Jaegan and Gordin. Jaegan is a highly respected Knight (if not the right-hand-man) of the King, not a babysitter for the Prince, part of his job might cross over with Retainers, but his job is not to BE a Retainer. And Gordin is just some kid (squire at best) that happens to join at the very beginning.
Part of the problem seems to be that IS is slowly losing its ability to utilize FE's medieval/feudalist trappings effectively, or at least whoever wrote Fates and Engage. In older games they made effective use of all the different life stations in a feudalist society to make characters with a wide variety of inherent social dynamics at play. You had lords, vassal lords, knights, professional soldiers, any of which may or may not lead armies and may or may not be a direct member of a lord's retinue (a vassal and a retainer are similar but not the same). You had clergy of varying importance, mercenaries, merchants, commoners, assassins, collegiate mages, street urchins, the list goes on. And their station in life and their ONE maybe two class(es) informed each other strongly, and informed their relationships with other characters. You could guess a character's station from their class and vice-versa, and when they didn't neatly match up, there was usually an interesting reason for it. It all MATTERED. In Fates and Engage, and to a much lesser extent Awakening, there are only three social categories: noble, retainer, and commoner, and they're kept as simple as possible for the convenience of whoever is writing and whoever is deciding where to give players new units. And there's hardly any impact on character interaction because as soon as every unit joins, it's all chum and kumbayah and "I'm just so happy to be here with all of you!" Like, "yes we could write a touching character arc between commoner Alice and Count Robert, where they initially clash over a difference in food standards but eventually see the merit in each and bond over a shared love of cooking, but then we couldn't write Alice and Bob and the humorous 3-part garlic allergy escapade, and look at that! They S-ranked. In the wake of a funny food allergy story. Aren't they lovable for that?" All the aspects of FE's setting that used to be treated as a valuable framework for character writing and supplemental storytelling, is treated like an obstacle getting in the way of writing as many standalone slice-of-life episodes as they can. Because everyone needs to support anyone, verisimilitude and believability be damned. FE being willing to shape its game design to fit the setting, even if that meant some parts were "imbalanced", was one of its strengths that set it apart from other RPGs and the rest of Nintendo especially. Even if that resulted in maps or scenarios that were frustrating or unforgiving, or made it easy to miss certain valuable items or characters, as long as it obeyed the rules of the world or felt like a natural consequence of the story, it was easy to accept. Stefan being completely hidden makes him cool and mysterious. Jill being able to defect might seem like bs at first, but it also makes her one of the most memorable, fan-favorite characters in the franchise. Jugdral's holy weapons? Characters switching sides in Radiant Dawn part 3? Ludonarrative bliss. Having content that not everyone is going to see is not a bad thing, it just means everyone's experience will be different. Most kids that play Pokemon never actually catch them all. Tellius fans that actually unlocked Ike and Soren's heart-to-heart are very, very few. And that's okay. It's good that there are special things for dedicated players. It's good that some units or items can be missed. It's all part of FE's secret sauce. It's why "ironman" IS the correct way to play. And when FE moves away from all of these things, when it changes its map design, its characters, and its storytelling to accommodate the removal of these things, making sure that missing or losing characters or items is no longer a serious possibility, it reflects in the overall quality, and players notice and feel that FE is "getting worse", even as popularity climbs.
So I have 2 points to make on this: 1 - For gameplay, one thing I've also noticed is a common anime trope that bleeds into games like this, which is the person being protected actually being superior or more useful than the retainers protecting them. This is alot more subjective in games than in anime because a "good" unit depends on how you play and what you need, but it still seems pretty common that the royal units are the most powerful in their trio while the retainers always have to compete with either their own royal or some other units for viability. It's like there's supposed to be 3 tiers of power (royal, retainer, and commoner) and you expect the retainers to be either #1 or #2 depending on where the royal is. But more often than not, the royal is #1, the retainers and commoners share the #2 spot in direct competition with one another, and there is no #3 slot. So basically, every team ends up consisting of ALL the royals plus whatever works and often the retainers fall off compared to some of the other random badasses that float into your team... So then they just feel worthlezs both narratively AND as units in your team 😅 2 - When it comes to investing tons of money and time into developing characters, therefore they MUST be mandatory... I don't agree. I think companies are just scared to try it. But with Fire Emblem specifically, I think making these characters missable, especially in a game like Engage would have been a GOOD thing. It would have added incentive to actually replay the game and try out new characters and clear different objectives. I'm a firm believer that with Fire Emblem, replayability is a huge booster for attachment to the game and boosts fan reception. It also gets people more familiar with the game, story, and intricacies. This is why Sacred Stones and Blazing Sword did so well; they're very replayable games. Giving people more interesting stuff to experience on those replays is a huge part of making it work and missed content from the first playthrough offers you that and makes the world feel larger than just a straight line scripted event (another reason gaiden chapters are cool). Engage specifically feels like it's only worth replaying if you get the DLC because that's the only thing that could possibly add to a replay but even that hurts because you have to pay extra in order to want to go back into the game. Three Houses almost got it right but the process of doing just one playthrough was exhausting, so two more plus a DLC story was overwhelming, plus it STILL suffered from the same issue where replaying a route you already did offered very little. I don't think they're gonna fix it, but most recent FE games are either too long, don't have enough variance, make you pay extra money, or demand too much time on side content to feel good replaying over and over unless you're a completionist or a game reviewer...
Even though I love the older games more, I still prefer non-missable recruitments over checking a guide before starting every chapter. I believe they did that to make it easier for players to not miss recruitable characters, and most players try to recruit every character even if they know that they won't use them. The retainer thing is just a lazy way to add two side characters for every important character.
I don't mind characters not being missable as long as the chapter gameplay is interesting. Lets be real here, >95% of players will try everything in their power to recruit all of the roster. A unit starting as a read unit doesn't mean much more than one additional challenge you have to deal with during the chapter. If I missed a red unit I would immediatly reset the chapter anyway. So red units are only a plus if the chapter is otherwise uninteresting or it truly adds something to the story.
When you were talking about the differences in how retainers used to be handled vs how they are handled now, you mentioned that they used to be mentors more than friends and that there used to be less of them. But I actually think the most important difference isn't that - it used to be that retainers were almost always the retainers of the game's central character (or maybe a few central characters). Nowadays, random side characters get retainers. Sure, Lyn, Eliwood and Hector all had retainers, but it would have been weird if when you recruited Rath, he was like, "Oh, here's my two Sacaean buddies. They're joining too." But that's pretty much what it's like multiple times in Engage. It's also worth noting that the lords retainers used to be attached to couldn't die (because they were the central characters), but the royals they're attached to now can. In my Ironman playthrough, when Céline died, it left Chloé and Louis no real role in the narrative.
5:10 OF COURSE A RETAINER IS WHERE THEIR LORD IS, IT'S THEIR FUCKING JOB, ESPECIALLY IN TIMES OF WAR/CRISIS!!! IF THEY WEREN'T, THEY SHOULD BE FIRED!!! So, now, that that's out of my system: A retainer joining you "just" because their lord does so should be expected for them, as their primary objective is to protect their lord. That said, it shouldn't be the primary reason why they fight in the first place, and for many retainers that is the case. Lapis for example didn't start fighting because Alcryst joined your army, but because she wanted to protect her family, their farm, something like that (my memory of the supports is a bit hazy as I usually skip them after my 1st run, so there might be some smaller details I may get wrong). After winning some tournament, she became Alcryst's retainer, and thus started to use her strength/prowess to protect Brodia, and especially Alcryst. So she may fight for the player because Alcryst does, but it's not her sole reason for fighting. Goldie on the other hand felt indebted to Hortensia after the latter saved her life during a Brodian attack on Elusia, and wants to pay her back (and besides, she's not even Horti's official retainer). Does she fight for the player because Hortensia does? Yes, but that is to be expected from a retainer, or even just a friend. But she also fought against you, so Horti fighting with you is clearly not her reason to fight. I of course won't deny that there are also cases like Bunet or Rosado, where I couldn't imagine a reason for them to fight besides "It's my job" even if my life depended on it - then again, I haven't seen their supports as they just don't interest me, and never have, and probably never will aside from "Ooh, I haven't used this unit before, guess I'll have to at some point"
Your entire second paragraph kinda proves the point though they explain why they fight for their lord if you dive in to the supports which is ok but their only reason for fighting for your army is their lord. Compare this to anna she joins because she sees it as a money making opportunity, Jean wants to help your army because you helped his village, the old man who I’m forgetting the name of joins you because he has become disillusioned empire. He fights by your side to fix it. All of them are directly invested in the army itself or the goals the army is trying to accomplish. Every unit you talked about does not join the army for one of these two reasons they join because they are loyal to someone else who does have one of those two motivations. In other words when half your army does not care why your army exists or care if it gets destroyed so long as one or two people live you have a problem.
The problem is not that retainers need better reasons to fight, but that there are WAY too many retainers. If you play FE4, you have Alec, Noish, and Arden, who are fighting because Sigued is fighting, which is all well and good. But then you also have Quan, who is there because Sigurd is his brother in law and best friend, and Lewyn, whose main objective is to defend the commoners, and Azelle, who is there to rescue Aideen. Lex is there to protect Azelle, Ayra is there to protect Shannan, Beowulf is there because you paid him, so on and so forth. There are a lot of interesting characters who come together for their own reasons, and I think that's a lot more interesting and memorable than half the party just showing up when their boss does, then having to rely on supports for any more interesting characterization than that.
@@RadicalWard well said. I like modern fe games, but they are seriously getting out of hand with retainers as well as this overused "main character is somehow related to a dragon" trope
@@RadicalWardI wouldn’t mind many characters if the maps allow me to use more but engage map severely cut down on how many people can be used in a map despite constantly adding characters
Its a result of a major issue that the latest games have, too many royals. I miss the old games were you meet a random dude with an axe who you hit up a cool friendship.
To be honest, I think the issue for fates and engage having a majority of its units be retainers is mostly the fault of there being too many “Royals” in the army itself. Imagine in awakening if every “Royal” had 2 retainers. That would mean 2 for Chrom and 2 for Lisa. 4 in total, which wouldn’t sound so bad. Now let’s take Fates, we have Corrin, Younger Brother, Younger Sister, Older Brother, and Older Sister. Each having 2, that’s a total of TEN RETAINERS. This is taking into account that I’m only counting Jakob and Felicia for Corrin since Corrin still has other retainers / units who later become retainers (Gunter, Flora, Silas, and Kaze). If we wanted to include them, that would make 14 retainers. I know it makes sense for Royals to have retainers and for those retainers to fight for the one they swore their life too, but do all the royals need to be an official part of the main royal’s army?
the retainers we have, and the more lords that show up with their own retainers, the less space there is for independent and unique characters, they dont have to try anymore if they make every character royalty that automatically come with two bonus characters built in. its a real problem
you forgot that corrin has protagonist powers, and actually has 5-6 retainers, depending on how you count it. there’s flora, felicia, jakob, gunter, and later kaze. silas unofficially joins as well. mikoto had three retainers, those being orochi, yukimura, and reina.
I think theres a difference between being an appointed knight, or a royal guard and a retainer. Their job is to defend. a retainers job is more an all around title and a care taker. like theres a difference between Felicia whos a maid and whos duty is to take care and "Retain Corrin" where as say Kent and Sain's Jobs are as knights, they are to yes look after lyn on the frontlines, but they are also expected to look after all their other platoon mates when defending Cailen and they battle for Cailen not exclusively Lyn.
I'm an indie developer making a Fire Emblem esque game (Thanks SRPG Studio). One of our main philosophies is to try to minimize mandatory recruits. We still have a few, but the order when you get them is not set in stone. I did this mainly as a response to engage, and at some volume because of 3 houses, recruitment system, since it barely exists. There's barely any optional units.
One correction with Fates, Corrin has several "official" retainers but technically the only one that matters is Gunther. Corrin has Lilith, Jakob and the two maids, Flora and Felicia. While you can consider the other as servants, they were technically his retainers unless about combat retainers.
I find the fact that a non-story important character like Guy from Blazing Sword stands out so much more than the majority of the retainers from Fates, 3H and Engage. You not only have to recruit him as an enemy but you must have another non-story important character, Matthew, talk to him to essentially twist Guy's arm to join Eliwood and Hector because Matthew helped out Guy in the past. Frankly the retainer spam is only done for the sake of Fire Emblem Heroes. It's a simple way to buff up a game's roster who can also be sold as a pair in a gacha.
I thought the retainer system was tolerable in fates but I definitely didn’t want it to come back. It makes each character feel like they’re just there to check off a quota, instead of being an actual character. It’s very creatively limiting. You need to have 2 royals per country, each with two retainers. After that’s done, there’s very little roster space left for any other characters that could be more interesting.
As a script writer and a big fan of FE, retainers are the lazyest thing ever. You don't have to write encounters and reasons for chars joining. I genuinely hate this lazy script mechanic.
Same here. Even as an amateur writer i can think of a better roster. I had an idea of a princess fleeing an invasion to be helped by a retired pirate captain, with the entire first part revolving around re-assembling the old crew to help her flee the occupied country. You can devote one chapter to each crew member and have different scenarios.
What I don’t like about the retainers in engage is they barely have a personality when introduced since they are so loyal to their lords you barely get to figure out what their personality is like. At least with fates, they made sure the retainers got a chapter to establish their personality with the few dialogue they get
Yes, the video discussed what I was bothered about. I think the amount for retainers is one, but some feel like filler characters. I would not mind if their purpose to fight was for their master, but I do agree there has to be more drive to why they fight for their lord instead of being vanilla. Otherwise, some retainers are better off being depicted as characters on their own joining the army with their own motives.
I totally agree with you in terms of the retainer issue I personally felt like the Fates retainers were more hit and miss for me with a bunch of fun NPC recruits but with engage retainers are literally most of the cast.😭 Also for me Retainer’s in Engage where either yes I love them as characters and units or ugh nope bench them take Hortensia for example. Her staff utility and support is insane and so I used her from her chapter to end game but not once did I us her retainers because: A (I already had other characters I’d invested into) B (As characters they didn’t personally sit well with me) Great video nonetheless 👍🏼
A bit random but in my playthrough Blue Diamant died on me... The retainers were sad... Sailor Uranus died too so now I'm marrying Pepsi Utena to the pinky retainer
I aggree that Retainers can be interesting. In Fates Revelations, you recruit 2 retainers before their Liege. Saizo and Kagero This means these 2 retainers can face their Lord as enemies which is very interesting. Fates Revelations Chapter 13 spoilers: Ill share the vs conversations: Ryoma: Kagero. Kagero: Lord Ryoma, I'm so glad to see you're alive! Ryoma: Indeed I am. And it appears you were able to tell everyone where I was going. I don't recall asking for you to bring an enemy army with you, though. Kagero: Lord/Lady Corrin is not leading an army of enemies, milord. He/She can't go into detail yet, but... I feel that he/she knows something. Ryoma: It doesn't matter, Kagero. Anyone who doesn't side with Hoshido is the enemy. What will you be? Kagero: I...will defeat the real enemy and seek out the truth. Ryoma: I see... If you're so convinced you're right, then ready your weapon! Prove your resolve to this new path and cross swords with your liege! Saizo: Lord Ryoma... Ryoma: You would point your blade at me, Saizo? Have you truly joined Corrin and betrayed your liege? Saizo: No. My loyalty lies with you and you alone. However I feel that you are blinded to the real enemy among us... I do not think I am betraying you now. My actions will show you... Ryoma: Hmph... So even you have had your heart swayed by Corrin. Saizo: That may be the case. In time, yours will, too. I must get past you though. The fate of this town requires it. Please, find it your heart to forgive me for what I must do... As you can see both are still loyal to Ryoma but it's still interesting. Shows that a Retainer can be more than a "im here because X is here" character.
I will say, Fates, especially Birthright, handled the gameplay-issue with the retainers' recruitment a lot better than Engage. Counting Sakura as a continuous recruit from the prologue, her retainers only join you after the route-split, then at the end of that chapter, Saizo, one of Ryomas retainers shows up and joins you alongside Orochi. Iirc next is Hinoka, she's mostly the Engage-case of joining with her retainers, although they do start as green units from what I recall. Then Takumis retainers join up in the Izumo-chapter, seperate from him although still together, before the next chapter, Takumi himself joins up and at the end of that chapter you free Kagera, Ryomas second retainer, upon which she joins you, and after that it's a while before Ryoma himself joins. Overall, there are still similar issues present, but there's at least more variety compared to Engage, or even Conquest where all retainers either join with their lord, or join as a pair a few chapters before their lord... I'm pretty sure Revelations had that issue even more so iirc, having to mash all the lords and retainers in before a certain point. In general though, I agree that the concept of "every royal has to have a pair of two retainers" is getting pretty stale. It already made the cast of Fates too uniform, but kinda worked also because the story was largely about these two factions, very much divided into black and white, at each others throats, so... the uniformity within those factions made sense. But in Engage, it was definitely too much, especially with them being split across 4/5 factions, and with Engages already smaller cast. It just felt bloated. I will say that both Alfreds and Celines retainers to me feel like they worked. Them being early makes sense gameplay-wise, since early game you do generally get access to groups of units relatively quickly to give you more options as you learn the game (or in earlier titles probably also to make up for units you lose due to beginner mistakes), and character-wise they feel hard to repurpose into anything else, since their main role is mainly just as friends of their lords, although maybe they could've left Louis behind and had only Chloe join in that first chapter, so Louis then could've been a green unit to recruit in the Firene Castle-chapter, himself making an effort to liberate the castle (maybe with some other green NPCs) while Celine is away. I'm also fine with Alcryst and Lapis joining together, with Lapis being his personal bodyguard and also following a bit in Oboros footsteps, but Citrinne definitely could've been a seperately joining unit, possibly alongside Diamant in the defense of Brodia Castle, or after, or a new chapter before we get to Brodia castle that could've gotten us more acquainted to Brodia that could've just conveniently been set in a city that belongs to Citrinnes family, could've even made it a Paralogue. The thing is, functionally, she still could've acted like a retainer to Alcryst, they're still cousins, that's part of her motivation as a retainer, it would've made sense for her to still act the same way towards him, retainer or not. Amber, if not just a random commoner, also makes sense as Diamants retainer, but especially with Jade only joining one chapter later, at the border to Elusia, it probably would've made more sense for her to be a border-guard, or even a soldier that came for the encounter with Morion, maybe even HIS retainer that could've set up a connection to Diamant without explicitly being his retainer, she could've still even officially become his retainer when they found out Morion is dead. Ivy is a more difficult case, because as the oldest princess she definitely SHOULD have retainers, but neither of her actual retainers feel like they should be. Kagetsu could just as well join as a wandering Swordmaster just outside of Solm or even in that first Solm-chapter, seeing how he canonically comes from that part of the desert in the north-east of Solm, while Zelkov... is difficult to put anywhere else, but he also could've just passed as an eccentric living around the swamp in the chapter he joins. I guess they also could've explained Ivys lack of retainers in-game with her having retainers in Elusia, but they all are fervent believers of Sombron, like most Elusians, and Ivy didn't really build enough of a connection to any of them for them to come along to join us. Maybe we would've ran into them in a later chapter, like the Elusia Caste one, and maybe Ivy could manage to recruit one of them to our side there, heck, maybe they could've even spun it in a way where Mauvier was originally one of Ivys retainers but also was part of the Four Hounds and that's why he later acts so much as Veyles retainer. Fogado has a similar problem to Ivy, although potentially even more so. Pandreo and Bunet as a priest and a high class chef feel like they easily could've been seperate characters as well. But Fogado, as not just prince but as leader of his own vigilante-group akin to Chroms Shepherds, definitely should've had warriors with him, arguably not just the two, but there should've been more Sentinels, again, like the Shepherds, which, counting Chrom and everyone before Robin joined up, were like over 10 characters already. Obviously that would've been a bit much just for Fogado, and for that point in the game, but in that context, honestly you easily could've still had Pandreo and Bunet as part of the Sentinels, since a group like that definitely could use a dedicated cook, and having a practicing priest around might also not be bad. Adding on top of that, if Merrin was also part of the Sentinels, assigned by Fogado to watch over Timerra for him rather than a retainer chosen by her also would've worked a lot better, although the same couldn't be done for Panette since it would be a bit weird with Pandreo and her being seperated siblings if both of them were part of the same vigilante-group, not just ironically somehow retainers of the two royal siblings, so I feel her place would be fine to keep as is, as a kid Timerra picked up from the street and made her retainer on a whim. Arguably that'd still leave Fogados Sentinels a bit thin, but if we say Merrin was like the "strongest knight of the group", it'd work if the rest of them were just NPCs, although if we already were to turn the group into basically the Strawhats from One Piece, I feel we could also make Seadal a member of the Sentinels who's been sent out by Fogado to look after the temple with Corrins Emblem-ring. That way you could say Fogado would technically have the most characters basically acting as his retainers, but due to the element of the Sentinels being a thing, it'd still feel natural with there more being a focus on them as a group rather than as retainers. And lastly Hortensia... she technically already doesn't have retainers, Rosado and Goldmary only consider themselves as such, but they're technically still just Hortensias friends from the academy. If the writing actually put more focus on them NOT being her retainers but her FRIENDS who feel like they shouldn't leave her alone, they'd be largely fine, tbh, since that way it'd also strengthen their identity as individual characters, not just retainers. Maybe make it so Hortensia HAS a retainer, but they're more meant to observe her for the Four Hounds, so they end up as the boss of a chapter, perhaps even of Chapter 16 where Rosado and Goldmary join (since Chapter 16s boss in the game are Marnie and Mauvier, perhaps you could spin it in a way where Marnie is Hortensias "official" retainer similar to the idea I mentioned before with Mauvier being Ivys former retainer, but honestly it wouldn't really fit with Marnies motivations and personality I feel, and I don't think those should be changed). Ultimately though, I feel this is more so a symptom of a completely different problem: a large group of standardized playable royals (that all require their own retainers) combined with a shrinking roster of playable characters. Just like in Fates we got 8 non-main lord royals, spread out over 4 factions instead of two this time, each with their two retainers, and as a step up from Fates each with their own unique class. But Engage only had 34 playable characters, which, if I counted correctly, is literally HALF of Fates' cast! Even if you look at Birthright and Conquest seperately, I'm pretty sure it still totals at 45 for both of them, but also each route obviously only has 4 royals. So while in Engage more than 2/3rds of the cast were royals and their retainers, in Fates your army ends up as not even half made up of them.
I could only describe Engage's writing as cookie cutter. So retainers were a perfect and easy application of that approach. There are plenty of interesting ways to integrate retainers, it just requires actually putting thought behind them in the narrative. For example: A scenario where a lord joins you without their retainers. Said retainers being on a different mission. Then through developments in the plot, they're incidentally aligned with the enemy side during a chapter. It's a chance to highlight what they're fighting for beyond their own lord and how willing they are to just swaps sides at the drop of a hat. Anything to make them feel like people with their own independent thoughts, and less like accessories for their lords.
My opinion on retainers - The best example how they could implement retainers different from their lords is the L'Arachel Trio. With Dozla being older and Rennac totally indifferent. - One problem is that they hardly interact with other characters that aren't their liege or romantic interest. - Sometimes they underperform in comparison with lords (take odin, niles, laslow and peri recruitment in revelation, they're basically useless at that point)
I've always felt like that industry-wide move away from 'Optional Content' mentioned near the end was a huge mistake. The logic is understandable, sure, but the counterpoint is clear too. Just look at Baldur's Gate 3! It's FULL of events and characters that only a tiny percentage of players will ever see or encounter, and players LOVE it. It adds replayability, and more importantly, *engagement* - you can talk to your friends about the stuff that happened in your playthrough with a decent expectation that at least SOME of it won't have happened in *theirs...* and of course, it breeds a bunch of UA-cam-videos talking about hidden content, which is basically free advertising. Honestly, Fire Emblem would do well to go back to that old model, of having a 'core cast' of mandatory character that you can make it through the game with, and a supporting cast of optional characters you can recruit along the way, with the later often being more colorful and kooky. The effort isn't wasted just because you designed a character that half of players will never encounter - it's simply being directed towards a different type of value-creation! (Plus, it gives you the option of completely ignoring an optional character who is, perhaps, a bit *too* kooky for your tastes, leaving them unrecruited so you don't even have to deal with them hanging around your camp. >_>)
My problem with retainers(specifically in Engage) isn’t that there’s so many but that most of them are so uninteresting. I genuinely do not care about Chloé, Etie, Boucheron, Jade, Citrinne, Lapis, Panette, Bunet, and Madeline whatsoever.
Ike has retainers. It’s Soren and Titania. The difference is that Soren and Titania are actually compelling characters outside of their relationship with Ike.
I think one of my biggest issues with Engage’s retainers is that some of them don’t just have hobbies outside their roles, but entire other careers. Like, how does Jade have the time to write entire novels while serving as the bodyguard for her nation’s crown prince? Pandreo somehow manages to run a church while traveling with and fighting alongside Fogado. It starts to get a little ridiculous when you think about it.
I don't think it's very fair of you to say threehouses has the same problem as fates and engage. There are 3 lords in 3h, and yet only 2 have a retainer, and still, Hubert isn't technically a retainer. So we're left as Dedue as the only retainer in 3h. You can't say Felix or Lorentz work as retainers at all because they just don't. They are they're own characters, with independent arcs and characterization besides being there for their lord
Retainers I'm fine with. Having a half dozen of more lords is what I find annoying. I feel obligated to use the lords. I feel like I never know if there will be a chapter that requires a certain lord or like they'll just be plot relevant since they're lords so I should use them, at least. It makes me feel like I don't really have options to be flexible with the units I send into battle. Or they're just significantly better than the non-lords with more utility and unique weapons, so it's often unoptimal to not use them. I mean, I rather they be overpowered than pre-promote Eliwood bad, or Roy (I haven't played Roy's game yet, but I've heard horror stories). But I rather they just be normal, good units
@@jobo5300it's not about discovery because it's not set up to be about discovery anymore. Spending hours in Melee and Brawl unlocking characters and extras was absolutely part of the draw of those games
I think it also coincides with the over reliance on royals. Of course the series has always been about the grand struggles between lords but in Engage there are so many royals there is basically no reason to use other units. Fates gets away with this because it’s your family but with Engage, they’re kind of a bunch of randos and they just role the dice on whether you’ll like them and their retainers. As someone who likes to get to know all the characters it is actually disappointing to have to neglect almost half of the available to characters because you simply can’t devote time to them. Another reason Three Houses was so great, you could recruit the students you really liked and grow attached to your house’s characters without having to bench half the roster every battle.
I k8jd of get it with some characters but engage does have a few retainers that benefit from thst position best example i think i panette her being absolutely loyal to timara makes sense because timera changed her live essentially and goldmary and horrensia basically being bff's her not being a retainer probably wouldn't have changed her much
Retainers make more sense in early chapters when the army is small and needs to be filled quickly. When every few chapters adds lord + 2 retainers, it becomes an issue for gameplay, and then the story revolves way too much around their lord characters.
@@waddledottz How so? I mean, while I do think she has her flaws, she ain't Bunet (who comesat a time where a supposedly overkill-defensive unit just can't keep up anymore): At worst, she's a free early backup, and at best she's a very speedy unit who can use more damage-focused Emblems instead of Lyn, arguably one of, if not the most highly contested Emblem, as she doesn't need her speed to be fixed.
Yeah I understand the point the video is trying to make, and even agree that adding 3 characters at once while focusing on one detracts from the other 2, but I don't think that's all there is to it. The Engage lords just aren't interesting (besides Ivy imo). I find myself more excited to recruit Lapis and Citrinne over Alcryst, Louis and Chloe over what's her name, Bucheron and Etie over Alfred, etc. It's just a matter of which characters I like better based on supports and gameplay over their role in the story. And it's not like the Engage story does any character any favors.
What about Mauvier? I know you don't technically get to Talk to him to recruit him, since he joins at the start of chapter 21. But I feel like he should still count as a recruit from the enemy, along with Lindon. Anyway I agree that the approach to retainer characters has gotten old. It's too formulaic and predictable for all the reasons you gave. I really miss the days of recruiting units out of the enemy or other army mid battle. Really hope they make that more prevalent in the next game. Some retainers are okay, but not this many!
I'm surprised you barely mentioned fates since that was the series that birthed the concept of two retainers per royal. You couldve mentioned how fates did the retainer system better or worse than engage through comparing and contrasting.
Yeah but if your talking about being a retainer, marcus the goat would be the definition of loyalty that freaking guy is the retainer of maybe two or three generation of lords like Eliwood's father, eliwood and roy bro's not retiring even in old age even though he sucks as a pre promote in roy's gen you can't deny the man's loyalty
This is why I want a lot of characters that are in 30 to 40s, 70s/80s even again. Tired of all these youngins! The number of old characters keeps slowly diminishing. I'm also tired of the retainers taking the majority of the cast. I miss the merc bands, the non-royal people running from the enemies, people mixed in the enemy army due to certain circumstance, etc.
Honestly the retainers are essentially like that episode of SpongeBob where they are doing this because the lord told them to: do this because I told you too
I think retainers have a more of a gameplay depth than a story depth as ro reason you recruit them. In the first half of the game you need to get a lot of units in order to build up a good rooster and after the ring lost map the game expects you to have lost a good amount of good units so it bombards you with a loot of units. And retainers are an easy way to argue that suddenly you get 3 more units than 3 random dudes that suddenly want to join your group
You're wrong about Seth. Seth is not a retainer of Eirika; he's a retainer of King Fado, who dies in the intro. Seth is not even route exclusive to Eirika. Gilliam, Moulder and Vanessa are retainers of King Hayden, who's not playable. Joshua has no retainers. Kyle and Forde are the first retainers that join the same stage their Lord appears: Ephraim. But they're not route exclusive to Ephraim either. Duessel is a general and not necessarily a retainer of Vigarde. Knoll worked with Lyon, and is the closest Gradosian retainer there is. Honestly, the only retainer that appears on the stage their Lord becomes playable on and sticks with them for the rest of the game is...DOZLA.
Engages roster makes the problem so bad only 5 units aren’t lords or retainers Jean,yunaka,seadall,lindon,anna And i cant even remember was one in the past he coulda been and I wouldn’t be shocked
You know, I’d kind of love to see a situation where they introduce a Lord character who is non-mandatory, missable, and their recruit chapter is super difficult to save them in, but the reward for doing so is basically a super growth unit with incredible growths, but who then also gains the typical lord drawback of “game over” on death if recruited (basically their death isn’t game over if you fail to recruit them, but does happen if they die post-recruitment). That would be a very interesting unit to try and get. Could even explain away retainers with such a character with the Innes approach, where rather than retainers, the character has a pair of hired mercs backing them up if the character absolutely needed “retainers”. Bonus points if scenes then have variations with or without this additional lord character. But really, I think the overarching issue is definitely too much “retainer” focus and not enough loyal merc or patriotic sellsword characters, and especially not enough “normal people stepping up to defend normal people and joining incidentally” characters. I don’t knock engage in this aspect, personally, because the core gameplay is some of the strongest in the series, but it’s definitely an aspect the series _needs_ to address in future or else it’ll suffer badly for it.
10:43 previous games had no or little voice acting. Fates and awakening only had full voice acting in important moments or cutscenes. Fire emblem 8 and prior was sprites so it was less effort adding in optional content
😢 I miss when we used to have interesting characters that we encounter in the world dealing with their own problems and get around a map to recruit them.
i would say the biggest problem with the large amount of royals and retainers is the fact it comes at the cost of more "random" characters that join you and how you recruit characters.
The amount of optional characters become less and thus less effort on the map to recruit them.
Basic goals in the old games like keeping a green unit alive , getting to a village before it's destroyed to get a character or doing certain things to have a character appear are much less likely to happen or made much easier. Also. "Random" characters tend to have a different loyalties and view on things compared to a retainer. Pretty much setting them apart more.
I really do miss the random hobos you kinda string along to join your quest to kill a dragon.
We need more Guy-like recruits these days.
The chapter a character is introduced is their one big sales pitch moment. This is why retainers appear lacking. Their join chapter is inevetably focused on their lord and not on them. We don't get their strong character pitch. And without this, players are much less incentivized to use them and without use you won't unlock supports which would give further characterization.
This isn’t necessarily always the case. Celine’s got Celica in her join chapter which helps her yes but Louis and Chloe shine just as much if not more there. Timera looks easily the worst of her group unless you actively go out of your way to prepare another forged lance for her or significantly hinder the effectiveness of one of your lance units by giving timera their weapon. Alfred doesn’t exactly look good when he joins either ( none of his squad does admittedly but if I had to pick anyone etie looks the best by one shotting fliers). Pandreo easily looks the best on his join map since rosado doesn’t have the magic bow yet. I’d say it’s about even which lords look better initially then their retainers
@@ultimaterecoil1136 You're having a completely different conversation from what they're having. They're talking about characterization, you're talking entirely about gameplay.
That's definitely true in Engage. Meanwhile in Fates, you'd have some retainers join before their lord because the siblings of Corrin still had to do things elsewhere but wanted to make sure Corrin had backup. Oh, and some of the "have Corrin talk to the new recruits" scenes if you put them next to each other on the map at least gave you a sense of their personality but without some nonsensical scene like the meat song before Timarra joined. "It's a battle, Xander told us to find you and help and we were just in time, talk more later?" That works so much better because you really don't have the luxury of chatting while in a literal battlefield.
@@Vanessomaticone of the things that fates did right is give the retainers and other characters enough dialogue where you can figure out how they are personality wise
This. For me I completely skipped characters because I didn’t know a lot about them since the dialogue wasn’t well establish in the main story to give me an idea on how these characters are personality wise. For me I think the biggest offender when it comes to not knowing the characters are ivy retainers kagetsu and zeklov (seriously the only dialogue these characters do is kagetsu saying a generic we must help them and complementing a ring and zeklov just help stealing a ring with no establishment on how they behave) what’s worse is they don’t even get a cutscene at the end of the escape mission where you can figure out how their personality is really like at the end of the chapter because it only focuses on ivy and the main lords. And even as enemies it’s the generic of them being loyal to their lord so not much of an idea in how they really are. It sucks how the only way you will learn more about a lot of characters is the supports and even then depending on who supports you get it can either help establish or you get too much of their “quirk” (Celine obsesión with tea, Chloe fairy tails, friendship, etc)
Funny enough I think fates did a good enough balance. The retainers don’t play a big role however with just a few dialogue before the battle starts the characters do get a chance to show their personality so you have an idea on how they behave and the chapter usually helps with them showing off their skills (more of the characters should’ve had a yunaka like chapter where they get to shine and show off their playstyle and feel relevant enough to be in the game since many characters just join cause the divine dragon or the lord says let’s join alear)
Awakening is interesting. Frederick is both Chrom's and Lissa's retainer, when IS could have added one for Lissa. Emmeryn's does not join the player and instead dies in the line of duty. Basilio's (Lon'qu) is relieved from his duties while Flavia's guards the border and does not join your army. Another 10 points for Awakening being a masterpiece
I... guess you could say Lon'qu is Basilios retainer, but tbh the story never portrays him as such, he's Basilios "champion" for the tournament to decide the Khan, which feels more like he's a gladiator Basilio "owns", imo, even if there's no slavery involved like with Roman gladiators. In the first place, with how Regna Ferox is a "nation of warriors", even more so than Brodia, I feel like the concept of "retainers" is superfluous in their culture in the first place.
As for Lissa... you could say Maribelle kinda fills the position of a retainer? Kinda like how Rosado and Goldmary in Engage also aren't "officially" Hortensias retainers, they see themselves in a similar vein. Aside from that, I'd assume she WOULD have her own guardian assigned... if she wasn't already always around Chrom anyways, so Em trusts Chrom to have an eye on Lissa, while Frederick guards Chrom and thus is indirectly also assigned to Lissa.
5 POINTS
Masterpiece is a stretch. But your point still stands. Awakening (unless you count Echoes) was the last game where you didn't constantly have the same system of recruiting allies in packs of 3.
@@ResurgentRaven
Ironically, Three Houses (plus Three Hopes) is the only post-Awakening game that lacks this "package deal of three units" system.
Though yes, SoV gets credit for not insisting on its sets of three needing to feature two retainers and their 'employer'.
And Awakenign have the courage to have characters you CAN miss. In my first playtrough I killed Gaius, because I dont know that I can recruit him, for example.
The Fates retainers I actually liked because they had their moments, and because there were quite a few non-retainer characters as well. Sure, you had Selena and Beruka, but a couple of chapter later you got Charlotte and Benny. For Hana and Subaki, you get Hayato and Rinkah. Not to mention Kaden and Keaton both are characters not even allied to your nation that join you. That makes for more variety.
During Engage’s promo when they revealed all characters one by one, I grew so tired to read “this character is [insert lord]’s retainer, but they also have this one character trope they fill!” When Bunet and Pandreo were revealed I was like “oh cool, a chef and a priest that must make for some interesting storytelling” only to then find out they were Fogado’s retainers was a bummer. Ironically, Fogado and his relationship to his retainers is actually one of my favorites in the game. Off the top of my head, Yunaka is the only non-retainer, non-lord that joins your army until you get Veyle all the way at the end. That’s way too many in an already one-note cast. The overflow of retainers in Engage is one of my biggest complaints of that game lmao, I really hope they remedy this in the next game. Or at least make them like Hubert or Dedue where they have very heavily explored reasons for being the way they are.
I think you forgot About Seadal. The dancer of engage. And Lindon, the old guy you find on the boat chapter near the end. I think Saphir was king morions retainer so that makes only 4 characters who aren't a retainer or royal in some form.
There’s also Anna technically
@@ladyyoruichichan9006 They're still a minority which is the point and main problem. FE is developing this problem with, bizarrely enough... this need for "country equality"?, especially in Engage, where every single country MUST have 2 lords, each with 2 retainers. (Jade and Amber both fill this role for Diamante by design, even if they join at different times and for different reasons). Hell, Brodia's royals are all guys while Ilusia's royals are all girls for "balance", and Firene and Solm are counterparts in how their royals work, with the crown prince and crown princess being male and female respectively. It's so... irritating with the "synergy", it takes me out of the story with how "orderly" and "perfect" it is.
Solm, Firene's royals, and Ilusia's characters' supports were probably some of the best aspects of Engage. Engage honestly is heavily reminiscent of Fates, the story is garbage, the avatar is honestly worse than Corrin (I just did not care about them half of the time because of how "safe" they are, compared to the Three Houses trio, I didn't even remember their "character moment" scenes tbh after I finished the game), Lumera is sadly "dead parented" again.
An anniversary game absolutely should not be spent rehashing the same plots and the worst aspects of a series, because "the other games did them". Anniversary games should be showcasing what the series PEAK is (aka good characters, good story, good gameplay, etc). What we got was typical lazy writing from the same studio behind Fates.
(Also I'm not ignoring how Engage was also heavily localized, they were also pulling Fates-tier controversies again in the Japanese version, Nintendo was smart enough to change S supports to bond ring supports since Celine is 17 and they foresaw that being a problem.)
And, in a game like Fates, the retainers are actually usable. Effie is probably the best armor knight in the series- unlike Louis, she doesn't fall off.
I really think the bigger problem is having a self insert that is expected to be able to bang everyone on the roster, it severely limits how the entire roster looks and age and such
Did it tho? Alear couldn't marry everyone, they just gave their most treasured person a ring. We had old guys and gals and a child soldier in Anna, so i dunno what ages are missing.
Also it's better without child soldiers anyway
@@boshman11 We had multiple child-soldiers even. At the very least Jean alongside Anna, and then depending on what age you assign to Hortensia and perhaps Celine.
In contrast we had like 3 old people in Vander, Lindon and Saphir, a bunch of characters probably around their mid- to late 20s, I feel like Mauvier, Zelkov and perhaps Bunet are the only ones that really feel like they could be over 30 and be more "middle-aged men".
@@Justic_ oh true forgot about Jean and Hortensia. Celine obviously not though cuz she's the political leader of the country and wise and hardened etc.
I also want more older characters, too. Saphir and Mauvier and Zelkov and Lindon were among the best in Engage, and the game coulda benefited from some more characters like em. But that was more because of Engage's weird artstyle and design decisions, I feel.
@@boshman11that’s only because the localization removed romance from most of the S supports in Engage
It also didn’t help that the supports essentially were meaningless since only alear ending changes and it’s still pretty generic . Not to mention how grinding it was to raise the support and depending on the support will either give you information that develop the characters or you get more of their gimmick personality which could make players not want to learn more about the character (I skipped Celine because I got to many supports when it looks like she was a tea addict I know why she does this however waiting for the A support takes too long. Her and alfred real reason should’ve been part of the main story and not hidden behind the support since it would explain why Alfred is behaving like that)
Funny thing is, Fates seemed like it got retainers 'right' to the extent that it used a lot of them. They weren't always introduced as "here's a prince(ss) and their two sidekicks"; the retainers were often recruited, or at least encountered, while they were off doing things for their liege. Some of them were doing things *they* decided their liege would need done, or where doing it "my way", or had other minor disagreements.
One thing about Retainers in a game such as Fates is that a lot of the retainers join at way earlier points than their liege. Think of how Lazlow and Peri get a scene to themselves where they fend off Ryoma of all people without Xander being in sight. It was still a slight problem, but not as glaring as when retainers often join in Engage with maybe one line of dialogue while their liege is the focus of the scene.
Characters in Engage generally just have such non introductions its nutty.
You also only have 4 siblings. Even counting Felicia and Jakob that's 10 retainers per route. In Engage there are 10 royals, so 20 retainers. 30 unit slots that are nobility. 22 counting clanne and framme. 24 if you count saphir and lindon, who are ex retainers of the dead kings. 25 if you consider mauvier a retainer. Essentially 90% of your army is nobility. It doesn't help that there's so little world building in the story which really doesn't help the characters be interesting when most of their deal is their position in their vague society.
You also tend to get them in fates at the exact points you need them, especially conquest, which gives them more impact. Arthur and Effie showing up just as you're about to feel overwhelmed, Niles and Odin making the whole chapter much more manageable. Only Selena and Beruka show up with their lord here, but you need ALL of them for that chapter so they show their worth
Ironically asides from Alcryst, Celine and Diamant I dropped the lords and used their retainers more often than not.
they just seemed more interesting than their Lords most off the time.
I think so too. But being the bodyguard of one specific noble, they would constantly say their lord's name. Which just limit their character in my opinion.
To be fair 2nd lord are kinda pointless most of the time, they die instead of retreat is pretty much obvious flag that they’re irrelevant
I think it's a very funny coincidence that in my current Engage run I've benched the three lords you mentioned but I'm using one of each of their retainers. Being Citrinne, Chloé and Amber.
I used mostly retainers on Fates.
@@ploppman7524bro same those 3 for me were just absolute crit machines.
I really hate how the retainers are implemented in the main story. Even in awakening and fates they may not have played a major role however you got enough information to figure out their personality about the character and usually the chapter gives you enough time to learn about them. Most of engage retainers don’t get that opportunity since they either waste it for the divine dragon or it’s very poorly implemented (kagetsu and zelkov only have 2 lines when you see them and it’s not even about themselves it’s just them wanting to do the generic help the main character)
I miss individual characters.... or characters that would come up in pairs like Lute and Arthur idk
One of Engage biggest problems is that there would be so much potential in random characters (Yunaka, the dancer, Saphir, Lindon) but they are so isolated that they are forgotten (except for papaya girl)
Retainers could a trope that's played with. The retainer serves heir lord but not necessarily you, but what we usually get instead is a crutch narratively
its so odd to me how engage focuses so much lens and characters on the non-alear lords, but then just stops caring about them. ivy, alfred, timerra, and diamant pretty much just stop appearing in 95% of cutscenes halfway through the game, and every cutscene from there on is about veyle and the four hounds.
its one of the many factors that makes engage feel so lifeless to me. at least fates bothered to give its characters screentime
Tbf three houses suffers of thr same thing. Outside the main lords, the other students don't do anything in the main story, outside hubert. Even dedue is pretty meaningless in azure moon.
@@mihaimercenarul7467 sadly it's because for some reason Dedue can die so they have to write every scene as if he could have died in any one of them making him just as generic as every other student while someone who is probably one of the least popular unit (Gilbert) is written as a replacement for dedue and seteth and he isn't even that memorable. Aside from being a bad dad
Alfred and ivy do get focus, but for some reason they keep adding vander when said line could have been given to timerra and diamont
@@mihaimercenarul7467at least theyre in cutscenes though. id say hilda in verdant wind has more story cutscene dialogue than alfred in all of engage
@@mihaimercenarul7467also, i said the issue was engage's main lords not having screentime, which makes giving them retainers feel pointless. 3h does not suffer that at all, as its main lords are extremely prominent in every cutscene of their path
Ive been struggling to get through Engage and it boils down to just not caring about the characters. As you said, they don’t have any personal motivations or anything to connect to. Even the lords themselves feel like empty vessels that are just there to spew on about how awesome the divine dragon is.
So I took a few notes as I watched this. We can agree to disagree, but here's my take.
-I'll argue that Alm doesn't have retainers. His friends are exactly that-friends. All of them join the Deliverance for different reasons (excluding Faye, who's in love with Alm).
-Being a retainer does not entirely mean there isn't room for character growth. These characters work fundamentally as supporting characters-they're not the main focus of the game. It doesn't mean there can't be retainers with depth and intrigue, but remember that Engage specifically focuses on Alear.
-Young retainers aren't bad by nature. Supports work well for several of them and provide important depth to them. For example, Citrinne has a very unique support with Yunaka, Pandreo and Panette both have family issues that motivated them to being retainers, Kagetsu wants to see the outside world and constantly challenge himself (evident in his supports), and Jade, Bunet and Rosado all want to fucus on their respective talents.
-I agree that retainers do pose a problem recruitment wise. Considering how older FE has you recruiting enemies, spending money on mercenaries, meeting specific conditions to recruit them, and rare units with all of the above, Engage having a Noble + Retainer model hurts. It hurts even more since you only have a few ally recruits and a single enemy one.
-So Three Houses. The only real retainers are Hubert, who comes from an undying family of loyalty to Edelgard, and Dedue, who owes his life to Dimitri and the only person he's grown to genuinely respect. Everyone else has their own motivations and goals outside of the main lord. You even have some such as Lorenz and Felix who actively go against the grain and question the main lord (Felix more notably.) All of this was brought up though.
-I'll say just about nobody really dares to push back in Engage. Not a single retainer questions the decisions or actions their respective lord makes.
-As for why they use retainers more commonly, I couldn't say but I can take guesses. They definitely do learn from some mistakes, with Engage looking really well, a fun combat system, but as for characters, I'd say the reason they do this more often is because it's safe. What's easier; unorthodox recruitment methods, paying for certain characters to join, meeting conditions, route splits? Or having a royal and their buddies join? IS went with the latter, with only few exceptions for Engage.
It's a choice I don't agree with since I love recruiting people and feeling like I earned it. It's fun recruiting someone like Xavier, who has the hardest conditions in FE history-it's fun recruiting someone like Stefan, who randomly shows up with no warning and has impressive stats. It's fun recruiting enemies like Cormag or Dussel who have a change of heart, whenever it be their morals are challenged or because something happens in game that changes them. Retainers are fine when they're done right, but I heavily prefer the older games where you had to recruit stronger units.
As for your point on why they are using retainers more commonly, at least one of the reasons I can think of is because this is an anniversary game, so this is a call back to the Fate Royalties having 2 retainers each.
Whoa. Bro wrote a whole essay. Or maybe rebuttal?
One thing I have a problem with 3H is that first time Playthrough on any person that is on the switch is that it is basically Impossible to recruit a character. You basically have to hope you get the flowers and the best gifts to the student you want early game and at the right professer level makes it easier. The new players are going to boost those stats and get no response from them joining only getting the One Student (unless you chose Church of Seros) [since you are most likely to do Romance with the House Leader because of the trailers and choosing the gender based off of that]
My first time I chose Black Eagles and only was able to recruit One Student Lysithia.
I would honestly argue Three Houses has exactly _TWO_ retainers: Hubert and Dedue. Everyone else can be recruited away from their house, so pulling them away from whoever they'd theoretically be a retainer for isn't off the table, which I'd argue disqualifies them from retainer status.
This, incidentally, makes Hilda some sort of antiretainer for Edelgard, as Crimson Flower is the only route in which Hilda cannot be recruited, due to being unable to deal with Edelgard's authoritative nature.
I suppose I could be convinced that Gilbert becomes a retainer for Dimitri, since he's exclusive to Azure Moon, but I haven't finished that route yet and I honestly don't know if I ever will, Dimitri just does not interest me as a character.
Some extra detail that might be important is that 3h was functionally my first Fire Emblem, so those two pretty much defined my expectations for a retainer character- their entire life revolves around their lord, they absolutely will die and kill for them, and they cannot _under any circumstances_ be pulled away from them. I can't really say that _Any_ unit in Awakening met those expectations, with the closest being _Tharja's_ yandere ass who I want nowhere close to me, and I haven't played Fates yet.
Cyril and Catherine too but only in CF since they're unrecruitable until/unless you pivot to SS. They serve the retainer function for Rhea/Seiros
@@StarshadowMelody Same here!
I think that's why 3H gets away with it - there's less retainers in general, and those who are more restrictive in their recruitment have very solid characterisation to explain why. Dedue has a much more involved reason to be loyal to his lord than Lapis or Hana for example, and even units like Catherine or Hilda are more understandable in terms of their restriction a bit.
@@StarshadowMelody Frederick? Literally has a nickname? Dude who clears out friggin pebbles for his liege? You're saying you didn't get that from Frederick? I can understand the rest of the cast, but Frederick definitely would die for the sake of Chrom and Lissa.
Those retainers were far more likeable than alcryst atleast. Engage was a tire fire of bad though relative to past games. I'll probably have a wait and see attitude when the next game releases
No but seriously. Engage kept shooting groups of 3 recruits at you so fast, I couldn't even keep up, and at least on hard mode, there was no good way to go back and train the weaker units, so my bench just got bigger and bigger. Some of the retainers are really great (Pandreo and Panette were easily my best characters, and actually really cool in their supports), but SO many of them are just "I sure do love my liege and have very little personality outside of that!!!". Individually they were a little more interesting than the Fates retainers were to me, but you brought up a good point in saying that the Fates retainers at least helped flesh their liege out better.
Solid video! Subbed, definitely gonna watch more!
I think you've missed the forest for the trees here: imo the number of retainers is only a symptom of a greater problem; the number of lords. Most older FE games have one lord per path (or one lord full stop). Birthright and Conquest have five (four if you don't count Corrin, six if you count Azura) while Revelation and Engage have nine. Making time to introduce all of these characters is narratively costly and introducing other characters as their retainers is an easy way of making up for that. Unfortunately it causes the problems that you mentioned in the video (although I think you overstate how much worse the motivation of a retainer is on average than a non-retainer). I think someone at IS has come to the conclusion that more countries with more lords is more complicated and thus better when this isn't really the truth and FE would be well served with a plot with a single country as the perspective.
Three houses doesn't really fall into this imo, just because its narrative structure is so different to most FE games, especially when it comes to recruitment. I didn't feel like any of the problems exhibited with retainers were exhibited there.
tbf, we had many "lords"/royals before in Fire Emblem already.
FE1/11 had Minerva and Hardin, both royals of their respective country, and with a group that could be considered their retainers, and Caeda as princess of her small island-nation, who potentially has Ogma as retainer. You could even count Tiki as princess of the Manaketes/Divine Dragons. FE3/12 makes Hardin an antagonist, instead you get Sheena.
In FE4 you have all the different houses, you have Quan, you have Edain(later also Brigid), you have Jamke, Ayra, Lachesis (and while Eldigan doesn't join you, you get his son Ares in Gen 2), you have Lewyn, Claud... royals and nobles all around, for the most part. Most of these do get carried into Gen 2 as well!
On a lower scale, there's a decent amount of local minor nobles joining Leif in FE5 as well.
FE6, you have Lilina, you have Zelot, you have technically at least Sue, even if you don't recruit her grandpa, you have Elffin depending on your path and then, royal or noble, all the big Etrurian generals join you.
FE8 is a big example for this, Tana and Innes, Joshua, L'Arachel, if Lyon wasn't the antagonist he'd probably join you as well!
I mean, FE9 and 10 are also largely about the political intrigue on the continent as well, so most of the royals join you here as well, Elincia, the Laguz-royals of all the tribes, Sanaki, depending on how you see it Pelleas...
Awakening also has a nice selection considering there's only really 4 "countries", in addition to Chrom and Lissa for Ylisse, both Khans of Regna Ferox join their army (although only late-game, but still play a role from very early on regardless), Say'ri as princess of Chon'sin, which is honestly her less important title compared to her role as leader of the resistance against Walhart, Tiki is back, and then there's of course the revelation about Robin that you could count, not to mention the various Spot-Pass characters which technically only get unlocked right before the final boss, but still all are characters that play a big role in the games story... sans Priam. You may also count Maribelle as a big noble, if we move from just the theme of "royalty" to the more general "nobility", as well as Panne as last representative of her entire race. Even Virion, small his role may be, but still, the first one to really notify you of the Valmese invasion and of course it'd be from a Valmese noble in hiding.
Fire Emblem ALWAYS put most of the narrative focus on royals and nobility, that's nothing really new, Fates is just one of the cases where they stopped hiding it, and of course the biggest case since the series got big in the west, with the most noteable titles before being Blazing Sword and Awakening, who are for the most part relatively light or discreet about that compared to most of the other games, to which Fates is of course quite the contrast.
I think in engage specifically both are a problem I don’t really have with any other game. The series generally relies too much on royal MCs, but the amount is a separate issue. With Fates, the conflict is based around two nations at war and the families involved with them, so having multiple royals isn’t too bad. The retainers get a bit old but there’s a lot of other characters thanks to the kids. Revelations may have a lot of royals and retainers but it’s also just in general has a comically oversized roster due to combing two full separate games, something Houses remedies by only having enough characters for one game and making almost all but 8 just potential recruits.
Engage is just royals and retainers though. Fates had some variety with the kids, but… Jade, Jean, Anna, the old guy, Yunaka, Mauvier, and the old lady are the only characters I can think of who aren’t royals, retainers, Alear, or Alear’s retainers. Thats 7 of like 40 characters. And all royals and retainers being recruited the exact same way just makes it tedious.
On top of that, there’s just no reason for engage’s story to focus so much on royals. Houses and Awakening have a few who leads the armies, and Fates has the family focus be a large part of the story. Engage you’re a religious figure and deity, so there’s no need for royals to be involved with leading the army, but the game is all royals and retainers anyway.
@@mr.stuffdoer8483 It's actually worse numerically than you've said: Jade is Diamant's retainer, Mauvier is Veyle's retainer and Lindon and Saphir are both retainers to dead royals (although you forgot Seadal) so the breakdown in the base game is:
Dragons: 2
Dragon Retainers: 4
Royals: 8
Royal Retainers: 16
Retainer of a dead and hence non-playable royal: 2
Other: 4
But yeah I agree with basically everything you've said.
@ I think a major part of engage’s issues with these is that it’s:
1. Here’s your god self insert and your buds
2. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission
3. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission
4. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission
5. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission
6. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission
7. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission
8. Here’s a prince and his 2 buds at the start of a mission
9. Here’s a princess and her 2 buds at the start of a mission
So the others, while technically retainers, aren’t quite as obnoxiously repetitive.
@@Justic_ I think the issue is not the number of royals or nobles but really the number of lords (the archetype) and there is far less lords except in Fates and Engage : 1-2 in BB, 3 in bs, 2 in SS, 1 in PoR, 3-4 in RD, 3 in awakening, 10 in fates, 2 in SoV, 4 in 3H (but 2 at most in each run) and 9 in Engage, there is clearly too much characters taking the role of Lord in Fates and Engage.
I think one of the biggest problem's with Engage's retainers compared to Fate's is the join time. With the exception of Rosado and Goldmary, every other retainer pair joins alongside their lord, and since the story is more focused on the lords, the retainers get less time to make their important first impression. Even Rosado and Goldmary still have multiple chapters where theyre fighting alongside hortensia, and talk almost exclusively about saving hortensia when they do join
Fates on the other hand, has more retainers stagger their join times, Odin and Niles join before Leo, and same with Saizo and Kagero in Fates. Sure some lords still show up with their retainers like Hinoka and Camilla, but on the whole more of the retainers get their own shot in the spotlight. Fates's recruitments still sure as hell arent perfect, the retainers still are forced to show up in pairs with or without their lord besides Kagero, but even just the MINIMAL staggering the retainers have gives them more time to flesh themselves out
"Why are you fighting in my army?"
"Because the person who signs my paycheck told me to."
I don't see how that is a problem, in war, outside of conscription, is the reason people fight in wars
Yeah it's realistic but also boring. The main issue with retainers is that they feel more like hangers on for their lord, not their own character with motivations and goals outside of "my boss is here."
In all honesty though, I've very rarely seen that kind of blunt response in an FE game. If a character actually used that, they'd probably be a number 1 character day 1.
@@ResurgentRaven that's basically 3H Shamir.
it'd honestly be weirder for the retainer of a lord to NOT join them in battle/ a war.
Idk I find invasion, going for glory, romantic interest just as if not more compelling. Like most of Fe1's cast is in the war cause it directly impacts them and their loved ones. Or in SoV's case most of the deliverance is fighting because they have to or want to, not just cause their boss is taking them to war. And with celica there's lots of interesting character motivations like with Valbar + Leon for example. Honestly I'd argue that most people go to war either cause of some intrinsic motivation or out of literal necessity for survival.
11:00 And yet Karla, one of the hardest characters to obtain in the series has some of the most alts in Fire Emblem Heroes right now
Remember how a long time ago we had a single retainer for two nobles with Finn serving Quan and Ethlyn and Karin for Fee and Ced.
Finn mention!
Retainers do not work for me either, although I will say that if they do not join at the same time as the lord they serve it helps their cause a fair bit.
But more than that I really miss the idea of walking up a valley and finding a weirdo living the hermit life and them just... Joining the fight for no particular (apparent) reason. Bishop Renault was absolute peak Fire Emblem, and I have yet to find better.
Weird... I kept Kagetsu and Zelkov, dropped Ivy
I kept rosado and goldmary, dropped hortensia
Kept Amber and Jade, dropped Diamant
Kept Lapis and citrinne, ditched Alcryst
Kept etie and boucheron, ditched Alfred
Kept Louis and Chloé, dropped Celine
Obviously I couldn't deployed all those ppl, so I would alternate quite a lot
Why drop Alcryst tho
Oop I forgot i also kept Merrin and panette but dropped timmera
Kept pandreo and bunet but dropped fogado
Good for you
Oh wow, that's great! What other things make you special and unique?
@@Daydream_NEtie the missle
I feel like if Royal characters didn’t have retainers though, it wouldn’t really make sense. If someone like Alfred, who is secretly very sick, was running around without protection, Firene would lose their Prince very quickly. The thing that I think fire emblem needs to emphasize is that retainers serve/protect their liege. “Bunet is only here because Fogado is. Merrin is only here because Timerra is” yeah, because their job is to protect them. I’m not saying you don’t have a point, but I think taking out retainers completely just wouldn’t make sense
Agreed: A lord's retainers fight for YOU because their lord does. That's completely fine, as long as their lord fighting for you isn't the reason why they fight AT ALL. And it applies to most retainers in Engage.
Having some retainers is good, having 90% of the roster be retainers is stupid.
tbf, past games also managed to do retainers, but in a way that made more sense/felt more natural than Fates and Engages.
Of course there's Marth with his group of cavs, but Hardin also's got a group of them, his wolves or what they were called were basically his retainers. Minervas White Wings. Even Nyna I'm pretty sure had a retainer in Midia iirc... and perhaps the other knights that were locked up with her, although I'm pretty sure they were just Archanean soldiers while Midia actually was part of Nynas personal guard.
Quan had Finn, Edain had Midir, Lachesis has her 3 NPC-knights.
Eliwood of course had his cavs, again, but in Hectors case I'm pretty sure Oswin fills that spot. You could also say that Harken was one of Eliwoods fathers retainers.
Dozla for L'Arachel should be THE most obvious case, tbh. I guess you could also consider Orson along with Forde and Kyle as Ephraims retainers.
Lucia and Geoffrey DEFINITELY fill that role for Elincia as well, in both PoR and RD, more so than Ike.
Awakening obviously has Frederick, but indirectly you could also consider the entirety of the Shepherds as Chroms (and Lissas) retainers.
All of them are royals and nobles with retainers, but they manage to implement them more naturally than Engage does theirs... and I'm pretty sure for the most part it's because they're mostly proper military, proper knights, which... a few retainers in Engage may call themselves as such, but on a closer look aren't, they're not even knights in-training, they're simply strong fighters that have been picked off the street and assigned to protect their respective lord... which sounds more like a mercenary than a properly assigned retainer. And just in general, there's nothing wrong with a mercenary becoming a royals retainer, that's basically what was the case with Harken after all, but a) aren't most of the retainers in Engage even former mercenaries or something of the sort and b) does this not really work when it applies to basically 90% of all retainers in the game. It works the best with Timerra, probably, since she's generally portrayed to be a free spirit, so her just picking up people she thinks are strong and having them become her retainer checks out, but how are Ivys retainers a basically even more wild selection?! A disgraced noble(?) who seems to have fallen to thievery and a wandering, foreign swordmaster, both of which basically have no actual relationship with Ivy AT ALL at the time she joins Alears army beyond being her retainers.
Most of those should’ve been part of the main story not hidden behind the supports. Especially since many time the supports were not that engaging and most of the time the characters are stuck with their obsession unless you pair them correctly like Alfred and Celine otherwise you get a lot of support Alfred obsessing over muscles or Celine tea
I mean, 3H has Dedue, Hubert, Cyril and Catherine, but the narrative justification is what made them interesting--they're not as gimmicky. Dedue connects to Dimitri's past/Duscur/Dimitri's MAIN MOTIVE, Hubert has been raised as the empress's shadowed hand, Cyril was saved from a war zone and slavery by Rhea, and Catherine would have been killed without Rhea intervening.
Lords are generally inexperienced and very principled so having someone to advise them is important, especially for areas they're lacking in. Ike is a blank slate for a large portion of 9. Soren and Titania fufill the job of advising him and handling things he can't, like the overall bookkeeping of the company.
Retainers work best when they do their job, are restricted to the lord and a very small number of plot relevant characters who aren't the main lord (7 does this with Marcus/Oswin being the retainer for the non-main lord well enough), or when they're not even units that can fight (the old dude in 11, Merlinus in 6, Lewyn in 4).
They also serve for exposition by reacting to whatever our naive and uneducated lord, and conduit for the player, might not be know the finer points of
Bunet gang rise up
NO!!!
One thing that I also dislike about the retainers is that they usually feel like they are lesser units compared to their royals. Like the royals get the dragon vein abilities in Fates or the unique classes in Engage. So the moment you get a royal and their retainer the retainer already feels overshadowed (granted some can still turn out to be great units, but the first impression is already kinda bad).
I think Engage was always meant as a celebration of the fire emblem franchise. So the story which seems half baked to most people, is actually just a bunch of fire emblem tropes all thrown together. So I think the retainers were a way to pad the cast in a game where the story is very simple. I don’t get the feeling that the retainers and amount of retainers will be a fixture in games going forward.
It’s worth mentioning that Corrin has FOUR retainers (from Nohr alone; six if you count their Hoshidan retainers of Kaze and Rinkah [Kaze is formally made Corrin’s retainer, but Rinkah is a bit less formal while similarly obvious]), not just two.
I mean as far as 3H goes I definitely wouldn't call all the students "sort of retainers". There are some examples as listed in the video, but a good chunk of the students had no real connection with their house lord at all before the academy. Blue Lions had the least there since the only ones not directly connected to Dimitri were Ashe, Mercedes and Annette, and in the latter's case there's an indirect connection anyway since she's the daughter of Gilbert who effectively becomes Dimitri's retainer in Part Two. Beyond that, Edelgard only really has Hubert since everyone else may have valid reasons for switching sides, and Claude doesn't really have any real retainers, not even Hilda really qualifies. At one point he tries to pretend Nader is one, and given his Almyran lineage it's probably not too inaccurate, but still. If you count Rhea as a lord though then a good chunk of the church staff can effectively count as retainers, especially Catherine.
That said I hadn't really considered the problem Engage has with it before but I'm inclined to agree. When a character's only reason to even join your army is because their liege joins it doesn't give them much time to shine. Alear alone gets 3 retainers, every kingdom has 2 royals with 2 retainers each, and even Mauvier can count as Veyle's retainer, leaving only a pitiful 6 non-DLC characters who are neither lords or retainers to said lords, arguably 7 if you count Veyle since despite having a retainer of her own she isn't really a lord.
Lastly, as for Ike's case, while the fact he isn't a noble does mean he doesn't actually have proper retainers, Soren might as well act as one since he's undyingly loyal to him even before he rose to leader of Greil's Mercenaries, acts as his strategist and tends to antagonize anyone who says anything negative about him.
honestly I think retainers can work well if done right, things that come to mind for me that include well written retainers are things such as Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms for example. Where even though a character may serve their lord and most often loyally, they still have their own ideals and motivations that shine through more than not.
You nailed my biggest complaint about retainers, I don't mind them if they're the starting crew ex. Christmas Cavaliers/Jagens but for every single royal in the game its a bit overkill.
I miss the in-map recruitments, where it is a challenge to get to the unit before the enemy kills them, or you have to free them from a Jail cell and keep them alive, or you find a enemy unit that is sympathetic to the cause and they switch sides mid-battle. (I loved the capture mechanic in Fates, where you could capture/recruit unique enemies too...)I hope that Intelligent Systems stray away from the "everyone is a retainer", and get more into the rag-tag crew that could.
It’s not really a problem with retainers imo, as much as it is a problem with royals. Fates and Engage each give you 9 royals, including Corrin/Alear and not Azura/Veyle (in Revelations, 5 in Conquest and Birthright). And then each of those lords has two retainers. If every lord had two retainers but there were like one or two lords, that wouldn’t be a problem. But in Engage there are 9 lords, each with two retainers, so you suddenly have 18 retainers. That’s way too many. I don’t think lords having retainers is a problem, I think the sheer number of royal characters leads to an even larger number of retainers. If I’m not mistaken, there are 8 total characters that you can get in engage who aren’t royalty or retainers (counting stewards as retainers). Lindon, Saphir, Yunaka, Seadall, Jean, Anna, Veyle, and Mauvier. And honestly you could argue that Veyle is a royal and Mauvier is her retainer, I just listed them here cuz it’s a bit different. But that’s it. You have more characters who are lords or retainers by the time you leave Firene than you’ll get non-royals or retainers throughout the ENTIRE GAME. My point is, retainers aren’t the problem alone. It’s the number of retainers and royals that is becoming a problem
Well, part of the problem you presented is also the generally shrinking size of armies, Fates still had 68 characters total, roughly 45 when divided into Birthright and Conquest iirc, meanwhile Engage has half of that, 34. Having lords and their retainers take up 27 unit-slots wouldn't be as much of a problem when there's more than 50 units total, or heck, even more than 45 should do.
Although I do think we definitely could cut down on the number of royals, why does every nation have to have the same number of royals, an older and a younger sibling? And why do both have to join your army? FE8 handled part of that pretty well, while you of course have Tana and Innes, somewhat mirroring Eirika and Ephraim as royal siblings of Renais, Joshua and L'Arachel are the only heirs to their kingdoms. Another step, as mentioned before, would be for a royal to have a sibling, but that sibling doesn't join the army, somewhat like Hector and Uther, or Emmeryn in Awakening (not counting Spot Pass). Granted, both of them die, but that doesn't have to be the case... kinda like Sanaki in FE9 as well, although she did of course become playable in FE10. Even in those cases, their retainers could still join the army, but they wouldn't necessarily add to the bloat.
Alear has three retainers.
Something else to keep in mind is that in fates, while there were too many retainers the retainers also pulled double duty. You might get one of the set then the other then the lord, or the lord might arrive and ask you to save the retainers, they were staggered. Also the larger cast size meant that padding the retainers with non affiliated green or res units or the rare enemy nation soldier like silas or mozu added lots of variety despite the cast being organized into 30 royal/retainer groupings. This is not the case in engage- while Celine joins and her retainers are a rescue mission, this is essentially a tutorial in the same mission. Every other recruit is “hi im a royal. Oh here are two blue units.” Unlike fates its always a three-for-one deal, no variety and no pacing
@@tirex3673 indeed he does. Again, the number of units who aren’t lords or retainers in engage is tiny
@@Justic_ I’d say it’s still a problem with the larger armies, but yes, of course having more units makes it less of a problem
Another issue especially in terms of Engage feeding into the recruit creep is the fact that they constantly recruit the lord and retainer at the same time (every chapter pretty much you have new characters, and a lot of the time you can just replace an old character with someone who can do the same stuff but higher stats).
It's less of a thing in awakening for instance, but in many of the games you can end up recruiting retainers (or retainer adjacent roles) in entirely different chapters (as they were stationed at a different location when x event happened kicking off the story, etc).
An easy example of this recently would be in Fates, where quite often a royal may well have sent off their retainers to help you when they couldn't go themselves, leading to potentially having the retainers join BEFORE their respective royals (which makes sense, retainer isn't the same thing as bodyguard so sending off someone else to deal with what you can't is a major point of having retainers in the first place, since you can't do everything yourself).
It can’t be for “so they don’t miss their new favorite character”
2 of the most thirsted and loved by community characters in Awakening were Gaius and Tharja. Both of which were enemy recruits.
IMO the problem with retainers is their comparable weakness and their role - retainer is understood neither as a soldier in personal unit or anything, in Fire Emblem retainer serves as a personal bodyguard and champion.
Here comes my problem - while I agree with your apprehensions of the story requiring more explanation to why they are there and kinda disagree with recruitment mechanic (as I don't care for battle/village recruitment) my question is WHY WOULD ANY ROYAL PLACE THEIR CHILDREN SECURITY IN THEIR HANDS AND WHY DO THEY STOP???!!!
In most cases royal is superior in power to retainer and that leads to many players fielding royals without retainers later in the game.
That makes no sense, why would a parent wanting their child to not die place their security in hands of people that effectively require their employer defending them? And even better, why would a character sworn to defend their lord allow said lord to go fight alone even ignoring lord's death afterwards?
That, IMO, requires change in type of"
1) Make retainers stronger unit than royals or equal in power but wiith bonuses to all stats depending on how close they are to royal to encourage retainer actually defending said royal - this should 100% be implemented, give more impact to Dragon Veins, allow only royals to visit villages, remove healer classes and make staff a secondary weapon only royals can equip (you know, play on trope of divine justification to nobility etc), basically play around with the dynamic while making things logical.
2) Make it so that fielding a royal automatically fields their retainers too. Those people are sworn to defend royal so IMO they would simply not allow the royal to go out into the battle without them. Sure, let them fight without royals but not the other way around.
3) Punish the retainer for outliving the royal - unless it's a story death a retainer should be punished for failing at their job in some way, maybe a stat drop, maybe inability to give and receive support bonuses (let them form supports, just make gameplay consequences non-existent after royal dies), basically make it so that player would actually feel the need to risk them more than royals in ironman runs.
Or TL:DR - make retainers actually defend royals and not the other way around, force royals to join maps with all their living retainers, punish retainer in case royal dies so players risk retainer more than royal.
tbf, at least in Fire Emblems context it makes sense for the royals to be stronger than the retainers they generally employ to protect them, since in most FE-games, royalty does have some sort of "special bloodline" that is supposed to make them more special than commoners, like Holy Blood, Crests, generally just dragonic heritage... or in Engages case just "royal blood" with no more explanation what makes it so special...
@@Justic_ I know they are special, it's just that I hold to the opinion that uniqueness is better than sheer power - as I said previously, put more emphasis on dragon veins modifying map, make it so only royals can master white magic, hell, you can even make it so that royals buff all units of their nationality or something.
Basically current type of royal blood makes it so that retainers have no point of existing since royal has to defend them.
Thank you! This is exactly how I feel about retainers in more recent games. In Fates it makes sense, after all the story is more personal about Corrin and his siblings, it makes sense most characters you recruit are Corrin's siblings and their siblings' closest people. But on Engage it feels more like a limitation. Especially on a continent where most people are devout to the divine dragon, the fact most people you recruit join just because their liege joins you feels like wasted potential. Hell, people like Amber, Jade or Pandreo could have easily join you like they already do in game without being retainers and they would have more room for character growth, since being retainers isn't even that relevant to their characters unlike other characters like Panette or Citrinne
I've got a very practical answer that I think ties into the points given in the video for why I don't see this trend changing: Fire Emblem Heroes.
Retainers, as mentioned in the vid, are guaranteed units. Which means guaranteed exposure. You get a (hopefully) cool new lord, and two freebie faces that players might connect with. Three units' worth of exposure for the price of one! If even one of those characters gets popular with the player base, then maybe more people will pull for that character and their alts in Fire Emblem Heroes, thus printing more money for IS. And they don't even have to worry about one of the units being missed, or being a Green Unit that dies too easily.
Plus, if the retainers aren't all grizzly old men or dumb mentors, they can be #Quirky and focus their writing on one character trait, all while looking spry and appealing. Even BETTER for marketing!
It's no secret that Heroes makes phat stacks of money for Intelligent Systems. I strongly suspect they'll lean into a design philosophy with their main-game characters that makes Heroes even more profitable. I'll be curious to see if they do going forward.
With 3 Houses and spinoff 3 Hopes, the way they are build it is still easy to miss a lot in those games. Supports based around having certain characters fro different houses, and even having paralogues. The 3 houses route split, and 3 hopes changes around recruiting Byleth or not. The games are good for playig casual, but have lots of things to offer for the completionist
One other thing is the classes of said retainers
For example, why would Diamant had an armor knight and a cavalier when is biggest weakness is magic?
Elise and Sakura both have their best friend in a defensive role and a seasoned fighter too
Hinoka has it the best, with a healer to tend her wounds and an archer to cover her back, similar to Fogado, except that their classes are an after thought and Bunet doesnt really show qualities of a knight in any way
Honestly, I much prefer using the retainers instead of the royals in Engage. The only royals I used in my playthrough were Celine and Ivy (though she was mostly a filler).
It really bothers me that you get 3 recruits in a single recruitment, mandated by the story, and two of them are completely forgotten immediately after the chapter they join your party is completed, while the royals are present in almost every major cutscene.
It is fine for the first few chapters, when you're still in the tutorial and your army is small, but by the time you reach Brodia you already have enough characters to start benching and the game throws 2 new royals and 3 new retainers with one recruitable to fill the role of DIamont's retainer. You haven't had enough time to get used to the new recruits, and the game is already giving you more and more units but not giving you time to spend with the ones it gave you in the previous chapter!
And I'll be honest, the royals are not really good, neither in character design, concept or gameplay. They all have their unique class skills as royals, which you would be missing on immensely if you reclassed them so reclassing is better suited for the retainers. And they suffer a lot from Engage's piss poor story!
-Alfred is as vanilla, cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill good mannered prince without any personality as it gets, and yet he's the royal that gets the most screen time!
-Celine at least is interesting in the sense that she's both a mage and a swordswoman, making her prime candidate for the Levin Sword. Her choice in weapons hints to an interesting character, but unfortunately the story never does anything with her because she's a sub-royal character linked to Alfred!
-Diamant is fine. He sucks in combat, but his design is okay and he is the voice of reason to contrast with his stupid suicidal father (who dies in vain because of his ego and makes things worse for the entire world). There's nothing interesting going on with him.
-Alcryst is the most interesting of the royals so far, starting off as menacing and stoic, with the fun gag at his over-the-top dogeza when he realized his mistake. But instead of keeping this theme of two sides of the same coin, he just becomes the soft spoken background little brother that's too scared to speak up, again, because he's a sub-royal to Diamont!
-Fogado and Timerra are the most interesting royals because the nobility of their country just is not interesting in ceremonies and other bullshit like that. They have a job to do, and after they do their job, they party with the people as equals! Too bad the story doesn't do anything with them either!
-Ivy and Hortensia had the potential to be the most intriguing royals because of their shifting alliances, but they are not. Ivy shows up regretful that she has to fight but is willing to kill anyone standing in her way, bails and then is forced by her father to fight to the death which she fails at that as well. She does make a heroic rescue after her father dies, but all the intrigue of her character ends after the royals have a very small bickering about her being partially responsible for King Sombra's return and is never made interesting again. Hortensia was annoying during her introduction, remained annoying throughout all encounters you have with her, and after her brainwashing is undone, she immediately becomes irrelevant.
Honestly, I wish Engage had made the enemies just pure evil so we could have spent that 15 minutes cutscene of the sexy dragon lady and the green haired masochist dying to better use with the actual characters in this narrative. Enagge is always trying to do something interesting at every turn, but never commits to anything and just drops all the narratives it hints at right after their introductions, and it is easily seen in the way the game treats the royal characters and their associated retainers.
I'm looking at the cast of playable units right now, not including DLC there are 36 units, only 6 of them are neither Royalty or a Retainer. Those units are Jean, Yunaka, Anna, Seadall, Lindon, and Saphir. Even then Lindon and Saphir are so closely tied to Royal characters that they're only a few steps removed from being Retainers anyway. It just makes the world feel way too small that the only people with names, faces and stories are those at the heights of society that all seem to know each other
I don't care about them being "younger" at all. They're meant to just be guards and peers for the person of royalty can get along with. I do not put Mentor type characters or characters the Royal has just met in the same category whatsoever. Cain and Abel are Marth's retainers, not Jaegan and Gordin. Jaegan is a highly respected Knight (if not the right-hand-man) of the King, not a babysitter for the Prince, part of his job might cross over with Retainers, but his job is not to BE a Retainer. And Gordin is just some kid (squire at best) that happens to join at the very beginning.
Part of the problem seems to be that IS is slowly losing its ability to utilize FE's medieval/feudalist trappings effectively, or at least whoever wrote Fates and Engage.
In older games they made effective use of all the different life stations in a feudalist society to make characters with a wide variety of inherent social dynamics at play. You had lords, vassal lords, knights, professional soldiers, any of which may or may not lead armies and may or may not be a direct member of a lord's retinue (a vassal and a retainer are similar but not the same). You had clergy of varying importance, mercenaries, merchants, commoners, assassins, collegiate mages, street urchins, the list goes on. And their station in life and their ONE maybe two class(es) informed each other strongly, and informed their relationships with other characters. You could guess a character's station from their class and vice-versa, and when they didn't neatly match up, there was usually an interesting reason for it. It all MATTERED.
In Fates and Engage, and to a much lesser extent Awakening, there are only three social categories: noble, retainer, and commoner, and they're kept as simple as possible for the convenience of whoever is writing and whoever is deciding where to give players new units. And there's hardly any impact on character interaction because as soon as every unit joins, it's all chum and kumbayah and "I'm just so happy to be here with all of you!" Like, "yes we could write a touching character arc between commoner Alice and Count Robert, where they initially clash over a difference in food standards but eventually see the merit in each and bond over a shared love of cooking, but then we couldn't write Alice and Bob and the humorous 3-part garlic allergy escapade, and look at that! They S-ranked. In the wake of a funny food allergy story. Aren't they lovable for that?" All the aspects of FE's setting that used to be treated as a valuable framework for character writing and supplemental storytelling, is treated like an obstacle getting in the way of writing as many standalone slice-of-life episodes as they can. Because everyone needs to support anyone, verisimilitude and believability be damned.
FE being willing to shape its game design to fit the setting, even if that meant some parts were "imbalanced", was one of its strengths that set it apart from other RPGs and the rest of Nintendo especially. Even if that resulted in maps or scenarios that were frustrating or unforgiving, or made it easy to miss certain valuable items or characters, as long as it obeyed the rules of the world or felt like a natural consequence of the story, it was easy to accept. Stefan being completely hidden makes him cool and mysterious. Jill being able to defect might seem like bs at first, but it also makes her one of the most memorable, fan-favorite characters in the franchise. Jugdral's holy weapons? Characters switching sides in Radiant Dawn part 3? Ludonarrative bliss. Having content that not everyone is going to see is not a bad thing, it just means everyone's experience will be different. Most kids that play Pokemon never actually catch them all. Tellius fans that actually unlocked Ike and Soren's heart-to-heart are very, very few. And that's okay. It's good that there are special things for dedicated players. It's good that some units or items can be missed. It's all part of FE's secret sauce. It's why "ironman" IS the correct way to play. And when FE moves away from all of these things, when it changes its map design, its characters, and its storytelling to accommodate the removal of these things, making sure that missing or losing characters or items is no longer a serious possibility, it reflects in the overall quality, and players notice and feel that FE is "getting worse", even as popularity climbs.
So I have 2 points to make on this:
1 - For gameplay, one thing I've also noticed is a common anime trope that bleeds into games like this, which is the person being protected actually being superior or more useful than the retainers protecting them. This is alot more subjective in games than in anime because a "good" unit depends on how you play and what you need, but it still seems pretty common that the royal units are the most powerful in their trio while the retainers always have to compete with either their own royal or some other units for viability. It's like there's supposed to be 3 tiers of power (royal, retainer, and commoner) and you expect the retainers to be either #1 or #2 depending on where the royal is. But more often than not, the royal is #1, the retainers and commoners share the #2 spot in direct competition with one another, and there is no #3 slot. So basically, every team ends up consisting of ALL the royals plus whatever works and often the retainers fall off compared to some of the other random badasses that float into your team... So then they just feel worthlezs both narratively AND as units in your team 😅
2 - When it comes to investing tons of money and time into developing characters, therefore they MUST be mandatory... I don't agree. I think companies are just scared to try it. But with Fire Emblem specifically, I think making these characters missable, especially in a game like Engage would have been a GOOD thing. It would have added incentive to actually replay the game and try out new characters and clear different objectives. I'm a firm believer that with Fire Emblem, replayability is a huge booster for attachment to the game and boosts fan reception. It also gets people more familiar with the game, story, and intricacies. This is why Sacred Stones and Blazing Sword did so well; they're very replayable games. Giving people more interesting stuff to experience on those replays is a huge part of making it work and missed content from the first playthrough offers you that and makes the world feel larger than just a straight line scripted event (another reason gaiden chapters are cool). Engage specifically feels like it's only worth replaying if you get the DLC because that's the only thing that could possibly add to a replay but even that hurts because you have to pay extra in order to want to go back into the game. Three Houses almost got it right but the process of doing just one playthrough was exhausting, so two more plus a DLC story was overwhelming, plus it STILL suffered from the same issue where replaying a route you already did offered very little.
I don't think they're gonna fix it, but most recent FE games are either too long, don't have enough variance, make you pay extra money, or demand too much time on side content to feel good replaying over and over unless you're a completionist or a game reviewer...
Even though I love the older games more, I still prefer non-missable recruitments over checking a guide before starting every chapter. I believe they did that to make it easier for players to not miss recruitable characters, and most players try to recruit every character even if they know that they won't use them.
The retainer thing is just a lazy way to add two side characters for every important character.
I don't mind characters not being missable as long as the chapter gameplay is interesting. Lets be real here, >95% of players will try everything in their power to recruit all of the roster. A unit starting as a read unit doesn't mean much more than one additional challenge you have to deal with during the chapter. If I missed a red unit I would immediatly reset the chapter anyway. So red units are only a plus if the chapter is otherwise uninteresting or it truly adds something to the story.
It would be interesting if someones retainer dies in their introduction and that loss defines that royal moving forward when they join your army
Remember when Corrin had like 6 retainers if you count Supports?
When you were talking about the differences in how retainers used to be handled vs how they are handled now, you mentioned that they used to be mentors more than friends and that there used to be less of them. But I actually think the most important difference isn't that - it used to be that retainers were almost always the retainers of the game's central character (or maybe a few central characters). Nowadays, random side characters get retainers.
Sure, Lyn, Eliwood and Hector all had retainers, but it would have been weird if when you recruited Rath, he was like, "Oh, here's my two Sacaean buddies. They're joining too." But that's pretty much what it's like multiple times in Engage.
It's also worth noting that the lords retainers used to be attached to couldn't die (because they were the central characters), but the royals they're attached to now can. In my Ironman playthrough, when Céline died, it left Chloé and Louis no real role in the narrative.
5:10 OF COURSE A RETAINER IS WHERE THEIR LORD IS, IT'S THEIR FUCKING JOB, ESPECIALLY IN TIMES OF WAR/CRISIS!!! IF THEY WEREN'T, THEY SHOULD BE FIRED!!!
So, now, that that's out of my system: A retainer joining you "just" because their lord does so should be expected for them, as their primary objective is to protect their lord. That said, it shouldn't be the primary reason why they fight in the first place, and for many retainers that is the case.
Lapis for example didn't start fighting because Alcryst joined your army, but because she wanted to protect her family, their farm, something like that (my memory of the supports is a bit hazy as I usually skip them after my 1st run, so there might be some smaller details I may get wrong). After winning some tournament, she became Alcryst's retainer, and thus started to use her strength/prowess to protect Brodia, and especially Alcryst. So she may fight for the player because Alcryst does, but it's not her sole reason for fighting.
Goldie on the other hand felt indebted to Hortensia after the latter saved her life during a Brodian attack on Elusia, and wants to pay her back (and besides, she's not even Horti's official retainer). Does she fight for the player because Hortensia does? Yes, but that is to be expected from a retainer, or even just a friend. But she also fought against you, so Horti fighting with you is clearly not her reason to fight.
I of course won't deny that there are also cases like Bunet or Rosado, where I couldn't imagine a reason for them to fight besides "It's my job" even if my life depended on it - then again, I haven't seen their supports as they just don't interest me, and never have, and probably never will aside from "Ooh, I haven't used this unit before, guess I'll have to at some point"
Calm down
Your entire second paragraph kinda proves the point though they explain why they fight for their lord if you dive in to the supports which is ok but their only reason for fighting for your army is their lord.
Compare this to anna she joins because she sees it as a money making opportunity, Jean wants to help your army because you helped his village, the old man who I’m forgetting the name of joins you because he has become disillusioned empire. He fights by your side to fix it. All of them are directly invested in the army itself or the goals the army is trying to accomplish.
Every unit you talked about does not join the army for one of these two reasons they join because they are loyal to someone else who does have one of those two motivations.
In other words when half your army does not care why your army exists or care if it gets destroyed so long as one or two people live you have a problem.
The problem is not that retainers need better reasons to fight, but that there are WAY too many retainers.
If you play FE4, you have Alec, Noish, and Arden, who are fighting because Sigued is fighting, which is all well and good. But then you also have Quan, who is there because Sigurd is his brother in law and best friend, and Lewyn, whose main objective is to defend the commoners, and Azelle, who is there to rescue Aideen. Lex is there to protect Azelle, Ayra is there to protect Shannan, Beowulf is there because you paid him, so on and so forth. There are a lot of interesting characters who come together for their own reasons, and I think that's a lot more interesting and memorable than half the party just showing up when their boss does, then having to rely on supports for any more interesting characterization than that.
@@RadicalWard well said. I like modern fe games, but they are seriously getting out of hand with retainers as well as this overused "main character is somehow related to a dragon" trope
@@RadicalWardI wouldn’t mind many characters if the maps allow me to use more but engage map severely cut down on how many people can be used in a map despite constantly adding characters
Its a result of a major issue that the latest games have, too many royals. I miss the old games were you meet a random dude with an axe who you hit up a cool friendship.
To be honest, I think the issue for fates and engage having a majority of its units be retainers is mostly the fault of there being too many “Royals” in the army itself.
Imagine in awakening if every “Royal” had 2 retainers. That would mean 2 for Chrom and 2 for Lisa. 4 in total, which wouldn’t sound so bad.
Now let’s take Fates, we have Corrin, Younger Brother, Younger Sister, Older Brother, and Older Sister. Each having 2, that’s a total of TEN RETAINERS. This is taking into account that I’m only counting Jakob and Felicia for Corrin since Corrin still has other retainers / units who later become retainers (Gunter, Flora, Silas, and Kaze). If we wanted to include them, that would make 14 retainers.
I know it makes sense for Royals to have retainers and for those retainers to fight for the one they swore their life too, but do all the royals need to be an official part of the main royal’s army?
the retainers we have, and the more lords that show up with their own retainers, the less space there is for independent and unique characters, they dont have to try anymore if they make every character royalty that automatically come with two bonus characters built in. its a real problem
you forgot that corrin has protagonist powers, and actually has 5-6 retainers, depending on how you count it. there’s flora, felicia, jakob, gunter, and later kaze. silas unofficially joins as well. mikoto had three retainers, those being orochi, yukimura, and reina.
I think theres a difference between being an appointed knight, or a royal guard and a retainer. Their job is to defend. a retainers job is more an all around title and a care taker. like theres a difference between Felicia whos a maid and whos duty is to take care and "Retain Corrin" where as say Kent and Sain's Jobs are as knights, they are to yes look after lyn on the frontlines, but they are also expected to look after all their other platoon mates when defending Cailen and they battle for Cailen not exclusively Lyn.
It worked in Fates and that's it
Hate they handled it in Engage
As a Lapis enjoyer, I have a bat :3
Yo, stop roasting my boy, Bunet.
Said noone ever
If we limited the numbers of lords or extra royals to like 4 maximum and then fill out the army with non retainers
1:30 moment that made me say 'holy shit really?????'
I'm an indie developer making a Fire Emblem esque game (Thanks SRPG Studio). One of our main philosophies is to try to minimize mandatory recruits. We still have a few, but the order when you get them is not set in stone. I did this mainly as a response to engage, and at some volume because of 3 houses, recruitment system, since it barely exists. There's barely any optional units.
the name of the game is Oathbreaker. Its on itch io... the one with the blue haired protagonist (there are like 4 games with the same name)
One correction with Fates, Corrin has several "official" retainers but technically the only one that matters is Gunther. Corrin has Lilith, Jakob and the two maids, Flora and Felicia. While you can consider the other as servants, they were technically his retainers unless about combat retainers.
I find the fact that a non-story important character like Guy from Blazing Sword stands out so much more than the majority of the retainers from Fates, 3H and Engage.
You not only have to recruit him as an enemy but you must have another non-story important character, Matthew, talk to him to essentially twist Guy's arm to join Eliwood and Hector because Matthew helped out Guy in the past.
Frankly the retainer spam is only done for the sake of Fire Emblem Heroes. It's a simple way to buff up a game's roster who can also be sold as a pair in a gacha.
I thought the retainer system was tolerable in fates but I definitely didn’t want it to come back. It makes each character feel like they’re just there to check off a quota, instead of being an actual character.
It’s very creatively limiting. You need to have 2 royals per country, each with two retainers. After that’s done, there’s very little roster space left for any other characters that could be more interesting.
As a script writer and a big fan of FE, retainers are the lazyest thing ever. You don't have to write encounters and reasons for chars joining. I genuinely hate this lazy script mechanic.
Same here. Even as an amateur writer i can think of a better roster. I had an idea of a princess fleeing an invasion to be helped by a retired pirate captain, with the entire first part revolving around re-assembling the old crew to help her flee the occupied country. You can devote one chapter to each crew member and have different scenarios.
>Lazy
You literally just described Kumoro’s writing as a whole.
What I don’t like about the retainers in engage is they barely have a personality when introduced since they are so loyal to their lords you barely get to figure out what their personality is like. At least with fates, they made sure the retainers got a chapter to establish their personality with the few dialogue they get
Yes, the video discussed what I was bothered about. I think the amount for retainers is one, but some feel like filler characters. I would not mind if their purpose to fight was for their master, but I do agree there has to be more drive to why they fight for their lord instead of being vanilla. Otherwise, some retainers are better off being depicted as characters on their own joining the army with their own motives.
I totally agree with you in terms of the retainer issue I personally felt like the Fates retainers were more hit and miss for me with a bunch of fun NPC recruits but with engage retainers are literally most of the cast.😭
Also for me Retainer’s in Engage where either yes I love them as characters and units or ugh nope bench them take Hortensia for example.
Her staff utility and support is insane and so I used her from her chapter to end game but not once did I us her retainers because:
A (I already had other characters I’d invested into)
B (As characters they didn’t personally sit well with me)
Great video nonetheless 👍🏼
A bit random but in my playthrough Blue Diamant died on me... The retainers were sad... Sailor Uranus died too so now I'm marrying Pepsi Utena to the pinky retainer
I aggree that Retainers can be interesting. In Fates Revelations, you recruit 2 retainers before their Liege.
Saizo and Kagero
This means these 2 retainers can face their Lord as enemies which is very interesting.
Fates Revelations Chapter 13 spoilers:
Ill share the vs conversations:
Ryoma: Kagero.
Kagero: Lord Ryoma, I'm so glad to see you're alive!
Ryoma: Indeed I am. And it appears you were able to tell everyone where I was going. I don't recall asking for you to bring an enemy army with you, though.
Kagero: Lord/Lady Corrin is not leading an army of enemies, milord. He/She can't go into detail yet, but... I feel that he/she knows something.
Ryoma: It doesn't matter, Kagero. Anyone who doesn't side with Hoshido is the enemy. What will you be?
Kagero: I...will defeat the real enemy and seek out the truth.
Ryoma: I see... If you're so convinced you're right, then ready your weapon! Prove your resolve to this new path and cross swords with your liege!
Saizo: Lord Ryoma...
Ryoma: You would point your blade at me, Saizo? Have you truly joined Corrin and betrayed your liege?
Saizo: No. My loyalty lies with you and you alone. However I feel that you are blinded to the real enemy among us... I do not think I am betraying you now. My actions will show you...
Ryoma: Hmph... So even you have had your heart swayed by Corrin.
Saizo: That may be the case. In time, yours will, too. I must get past you though. The fate of this town requires it. Please, find it your heart to forgive me for what I must do...
As you can see both are still loyal to Ryoma but it's still interesting. Shows that a Retainer can be more than a "im here because X is here" character.
I will say, Fates, especially Birthright, handled the gameplay-issue with the retainers' recruitment a lot better than Engage.
Counting Sakura as a continuous recruit from the prologue, her retainers only join you after the route-split, then at the end of that chapter, Saizo, one of Ryomas retainers shows up and joins you alongside Orochi. Iirc next is Hinoka, she's mostly the Engage-case of joining with her retainers, although they do start as green units from what I recall. Then Takumis retainers join up in the Izumo-chapter, seperate from him although still together, before the next chapter, Takumi himself joins up and at the end of that chapter you free Kagera, Ryomas second retainer, upon which she joins you, and after that it's a while before Ryoma himself joins. Overall, there are still similar issues present, but there's at least more variety compared to Engage, or even Conquest where all retainers either join with their lord, or join as a pair a few chapters before their lord... I'm pretty sure Revelations had that issue even more so iirc, having to mash all the lords and retainers in before a certain point.
In general though, I agree that the concept of "every royal has to have a pair of two retainers" is getting pretty stale. It already made the cast of Fates too uniform, but kinda worked also because the story was largely about these two factions, very much divided into black and white, at each others throats, so... the uniformity within those factions made sense. But in Engage, it was definitely too much, especially with them being split across 4/5 factions, and with Engages already smaller cast. It just felt bloated.
I will say that both Alfreds and Celines retainers to me feel like they worked. Them being early makes sense gameplay-wise, since early game you do generally get access to groups of units relatively quickly to give you more options as you learn the game (or in earlier titles probably also to make up for units you lose due to beginner mistakes), and character-wise they feel hard to repurpose into anything else, since their main role is mainly just as friends of their lords, although maybe they could've left Louis behind and had only Chloe join in that first chapter, so Louis then could've been a green unit to recruit in the Firene Castle-chapter, himself making an effort to liberate the castle (maybe with some other green NPCs) while Celine is away.
I'm also fine with Alcryst and Lapis joining together, with Lapis being his personal bodyguard and also following a bit in Oboros footsteps, but Citrinne definitely could've been a seperately joining unit, possibly alongside Diamant in the defense of Brodia Castle, or after, or a new chapter before we get to Brodia castle that could've gotten us more acquainted to Brodia that could've just conveniently been set in a city that belongs to Citrinnes family, could've even made it a Paralogue. The thing is, functionally, she still could've acted like a retainer to Alcryst, they're still cousins, that's part of her motivation as a retainer, it would've made sense for her to still act the same way towards him, retainer or not. Amber, if not just a random commoner, also makes sense as Diamants retainer, but especially with Jade only joining one chapter later, at the border to Elusia, it probably would've made more sense for her to be a border-guard, or even a soldier that came for the encounter with Morion, maybe even HIS retainer that could've set up a connection to Diamant without explicitly being his retainer, she could've still even officially become his retainer when they found out Morion is dead.
Ivy is a more difficult case, because as the oldest princess she definitely SHOULD have retainers, but neither of her actual retainers feel like they should be. Kagetsu could just as well join as a wandering Swordmaster just outside of Solm or even in that first Solm-chapter, seeing how he canonically comes from that part of the desert in the north-east of Solm, while Zelkov... is difficult to put anywhere else, but he also could've just passed as an eccentric living around the swamp in the chapter he joins. I guess they also could've explained Ivys lack of retainers in-game with her having retainers in Elusia, but they all are fervent believers of Sombron, like most Elusians, and Ivy didn't really build enough of a connection to any of them for them to come along to join us. Maybe we would've ran into them in a later chapter, like the Elusia Caste one, and maybe Ivy could manage to recruit one of them to our side there, heck, maybe they could've even spun it in a way where Mauvier was originally one of Ivys retainers but also was part of the Four Hounds and that's why he later acts so much as Veyles retainer.
Fogado has a similar problem to Ivy, although potentially even more so. Pandreo and Bunet as a priest and a high class chef feel like they easily could've been seperate characters as well. But Fogado, as not just prince but as leader of his own vigilante-group akin to Chroms Shepherds, definitely should've had warriors with him, arguably not just the two, but there should've been more Sentinels, again, like the Shepherds, which, counting Chrom and everyone before Robin joined up, were like over 10 characters already. Obviously that would've been a bit much just for Fogado, and for that point in the game, but in that context, honestly you easily could've still had Pandreo and Bunet as part of the Sentinels, since a group like that definitely could use a dedicated cook, and having a practicing priest around might also not be bad. Adding on top of that, if Merrin was also part of the Sentinels, assigned by Fogado to watch over Timerra for him rather than a retainer chosen by her also would've worked a lot better, although the same couldn't be done for Panette since it would be a bit weird with Pandreo and her being seperated siblings if both of them were part of the same vigilante-group, not just ironically somehow retainers of the two royal siblings, so I feel her place would be fine to keep as is, as a kid Timerra picked up from the street and made her retainer on a whim. Arguably that'd still leave Fogados Sentinels a bit thin, but if we say Merrin was like the "strongest knight of the group", it'd work if the rest of them were just NPCs, although if we already were to turn the group into basically the Strawhats from One Piece, I feel we could also make Seadal a member of the Sentinels who's been sent out by Fogado to look after the temple with Corrins Emblem-ring. That way you could say Fogado would technically have the most characters basically acting as his retainers, but due to the element of the Sentinels being a thing, it'd still feel natural with there more being a focus on them as a group rather than as retainers.
And lastly Hortensia... she technically already doesn't have retainers, Rosado and Goldmary only consider themselves as such, but they're technically still just Hortensias friends from the academy. If the writing actually put more focus on them NOT being her retainers but her FRIENDS who feel like they shouldn't leave her alone, they'd be largely fine, tbh, since that way it'd also strengthen their identity as individual characters, not just retainers. Maybe make it so Hortensia HAS a retainer, but they're more meant to observe her for the Four Hounds, so they end up as the boss of a chapter, perhaps even of Chapter 16 where Rosado and Goldmary join (since Chapter 16s boss in the game are Marnie and Mauvier, perhaps you could spin it in a way where Marnie is Hortensias "official" retainer similar to the idea I mentioned before with Mauvier being Ivys former retainer, but honestly it wouldn't really fit with Marnies motivations and personality I feel, and I don't think those should be changed).
Ultimately though, I feel this is more so a symptom of a completely different problem: a large group of standardized playable royals (that all require their own retainers) combined with a shrinking roster of playable characters. Just like in Fates we got 8 non-main lord royals, spread out over 4 factions instead of two this time, each with their two retainers, and as a step up from Fates each with their own unique class. But Engage only had 34 playable characters, which, if I counted correctly, is literally HALF of Fates' cast! Even if you look at Birthright and Conquest seperately, I'm pretty sure it still totals at 45 for both of them, but also each route obviously only has 4 royals. So while in Engage more than 2/3rds of the cast were royals and their retainers, in Fates your army ends up as not even half made up of them.
I just use whatever units that are native to their respective region. It makes deploying a less of a hassle to choose for me.
I could only describe Engage's writing as cookie cutter. So retainers were a perfect and easy application of that approach. There are plenty of interesting ways to integrate retainers, it just requires actually putting thought behind them in the narrative.
For example: A scenario where a lord joins you without their retainers. Said retainers being on a different mission. Then through developments in the plot, they're incidentally aligned with the enemy side during a chapter. It's a chance to highlight what they're fighting for beyond their own lord and how willing they are to just swaps sides at the drop of a hat. Anything to make them feel like people with their own independent thoughts, and less like accessories for their lords.
My opinion on retainers
- The best example how they could implement retainers different from their lords is the L'Arachel Trio. With Dozla being older and Rennac totally indifferent.
- One problem is that they hardly interact with other characters that aren't their liege or romantic interest.
- Sometimes they underperform in comparison with lords (take odin, niles, laslow and peri recruitment in revelation, they're basically useless at that point)
I've always felt like that industry-wide move away from 'Optional Content' mentioned near the end was a huge mistake. The logic is understandable, sure, but the counterpoint is clear too. Just look at Baldur's Gate 3! It's FULL of events and characters that only a tiny percentage of players will ever see or encounter, and players LOVE it. It adds replayability, and more importantly, *engagement* - you can talk to your friends about the stuff that happened in your playthrough with a decent expectation that at least SOME of it won't have happened in *theirs...* and of course, it breeds a bunch of UA-cam-videos talking about hidden content, which is basically free advertising.
Honestly, Fire Emblem would do well to go back to that old model, of having a 'core cast' of mandatory character that you can make it through the game with, and a supporting cast of optional characters you can recruit along the way, with the later often being more colorful and kooky. The effort isn't wasted just because you designed a character that half of players will never encounter - it's simply being directed towards a different type of value-creation! (Plus, it gives you the option of completely ignoring an optional character who is, perhaps, a bit *too* kooky for your tastes, leaving them unrecruited so you don't even have to deal with them hanging around your camp. >_>)
My problem with retainers(specifically in Engage) isn’t that there’s so many but that most of them are so uninteresting. I genuinely do not care about Chloé, Etie, Boucheron, Jade, Citrinne, Lapis, Panette, Bunet, and Madeline whatsoever.
Ike has retainers. It’s Soren and Titania. The difference is that Soren and Titania are actually compelling characters outside of their relationship with Ike.
I think one of my biggest issues with Engage’s retainers is that some of them don’t just have hobbies outside their roles, but entire other careers. Like, how does Jade have the time to write entire novels while serving as the bodyguard for her nation’s crown prince? Pandreo somehow manages to run a church while traveling with and fighting alongside Fogado. It starts to get a little ridiculous when you think about it.
I don't think it's very fair of you to say threehouses has the same problem as fates and engage. There are 3 lords in 3h, and yet only 2 have a retainer, and still, Hubert isn't technically a retainer. So we're left as Dedue as the only retainer in 3h. You can't say Felix or Lorentz work as retainers at all because they just don't. They are they're own characters, with independent arcs and characterization besides being there for their lord
Retainers I'm fine with. Having a half dozen of more lords is what I find annoying. I feel obligated to use the lords. I feel like I never know if there will be a chapter that requires a certain lord or like they'll just be plot relevant since they're lords so I should use them, at least. It makes me feel like I don't really have options to be flexible with the units I send into battle. Or they're just significantly better than the non-lords with more utility and unique weapons, so it's often unoptimal to not use them. I mean, I rather they be overpowered than pre-promote Eliwood bad, or Roy (I haven't played Roy's game yet, but I've heard horror stories). But I rather they just be normal, good units
good music choice!
10:05
ultimate is the PERFECT game to show here! you unlock everything in that game in three hours max and its so empty afterwards 😭
Smash is about mastering to play your character and not about exploration or discovery so i don't think there needs to be much unlockable content.
@@jobo5300 Agreed, and about just having fun with friends 'n' family
@@jobo5300it's not about discovery because it's not set up to be about discovery anymore. Spending hours in Melee and Brawl unlocking characters and extras was absolutely part of the draw of those games
I think they need to shake it up. Imagine having to have enough trust to gain a new unit instead of getting two by default with a royal.
I think it also coincides with the over reliance on royals. Of course the series has always been about the grand struggles between lords but in Engage there are so many royals there is basically no reason to use other units.
Fates gets away with this because it’s your family but with Engage, they’re kind of a bunch of randos and they just role the dice on whether you’ll like them and their retainers.
As someone who likes to get to know all the characters it is actually disappointing to have to neglect almost half of the available to characters because you simply can’t devote time to them.
Another reason Three Houses was so great, you could recruit the students you really liked and grow attached to your house’s characters without having to bench half the roster every battle.
I k8jd of get it with some characters but engage does have a few retainers that benefit from thst position best example i think i panette her being absolutely loyal to timara makes sense because timera changed her live essentially and goldmary and horrensia basically being bff's her not being a retainer probably wouldn't have changed her much
Retainers make more sense in early chapters when the army is small and needs to be filled quickly. When every few chapters adds lord + 2 retainers, it becomes an issue for gameplay, and then the story revolves way too much around their lord characters.
Might be just me but i realy liked lapis she was my favorite unit in engage anyone else liked lapis?
I also found merrin pretty cool
I love my little potato farmer girl!
For Merrin tho I couldn't care less tho
Lapis is one of the worst units on Engage so I really hate her lol
@@waddledottz How so? I mean, while I do think she has her flaws, she ain't Bunet (who comesat a time where a supposedly overkill-defensive unit just can't keep up anymore): At worst, she's a free early backup, and at best she's a very speedy unit who can use more damage-focused Emblems instead of Lyn, arguably one of, if not the most highly contested Emblem, as she doesn't need her speed to be fixed.
Yeah I understand the point the video is trying to make, and even agree that adding 3 characters at once while focusing on one detracts from the other 2, but I don't think that's all there is to it. The Engage lords just aren't interesting (besides Ivy imo). I find myself more excited to recruit Lapis and Citrinne over Alcryst, Louis and Chloe over what's her name, Bucheron and Etie over Alfred, etc. It's just a matter of which characters I like better based on supports and gameplay over their role in the story. And it's not like the Engage story does any character any favors.
@@waddledottz lol not a single enemy could hit her she dodged everything in my game
What about Mauvier? I know you don't technically get to Talk to him to recruit him, since he joins at the start of chapter 21. But I feel like he should still count as a recruit from the enemy, along with Lindon.
Anyway I agree that the approach to retainer characters has gotten old. It's too formulaic and predictable for all the reasons you gave. I really miss the days of recruiting units out of the enemy or other army mid battle. Really hope they make that more prevalent in the next game. Some retainers are okay, but not this many!
I'm surprised you barely mentioned fates since that was the series that birthed the concept of two retainers per royal. You couldve mentioned how fates did the retainer system better or worse than engage through comparing and contrasting.
Yeah but if your talking about being a retainer, marcus the goat would be the definition of loyalty that freaking guy is the retainer of maybe two or three generation of lords like Eliwood's father, eliwood and roy bro's not retiring even in old age even though he sucks as a pre promote in roy's gen you can't deny the man's loyalty
This is why I want a lot of characters that are in 30 to 40s, 70s/80s even again. Tired of all these youngins! The number of old characters keeps slowly diminishing. I'm also tired of the retainers taking the majority of the cast. I miss the merc bands, the non-royal people running from the enemies, people mixed in the enemy army due to certain circumstance, etc.
Honestly the retainers are essentially like that episode of SpongeBob where they are doing this because the lord told them to: do this because I told you too
I think retainers have a more of a gameplay depth than a story depth as ro reason you recruit them. In the first half of the game you need to get a lot of units in order to build up a good rooster and after the ring lost map the game expects you to have lost a good amount of good units so it bombards you with a loot of units. And retainers are an easy way to argue that suddenly you get 3 more units than 3 random dudes that suddenly want to join your group
You're wrong about Seth. Seth is not a retainer of Eirika; he's a retainer of King Fado, who dies in the intro. Seth is not even route exclusive to Eirika.
Gilliam, Moulder and Vanessa are retainers of King Hayden, who's not playable.
Joshua has no retainers.
Kyle and Forde are the first retainers that join the same stage their Lord appears: Ephraim. But they're not route exclusive to Ephraim either.
Duessel is a general and not necessarily a retainer of Vigarde. Knoll worked with Lyon, and is the closest Gradosian retainer there is.
Honestly, the only retainer that appears on the stage their Lord becomes playable on and sticks with them for the rest of the game is...DOZLA.
Engages roster makes the problem so bad only 5 units aren’t lords or retainers
Jean,yunaka,seadall,lindon,anna
And i cant even remember was one in the past he coulda been and I wouldn’t be shocked
You know, I’d kind of love to see a situation where they introduce a Lord character who is non-mandatory, missable, and their recruit chapter is super difficult to save them in, but the reward for doing so is basically a super growth unit with incredible growths, but who then also gains the typical lord drawback of “game over” on death if recruited (basically their death isn’t game over if you fail to recruit them, but does happen if they die post-recruitment). That would be a very interesting unit to try and get.
Could even explain away retainers with such a character with the Innes approach, where rather than retainers, the character has a pair of hired mercs backing them up if the character absolutely needed “retainers”. Bonus points if scenes then have variations with or without this additional lord character.
But really, I think the overarching issue is definitely too much “retainer” focus and not enough loyal merc or patriotic sellsword characters, and especially not enough “normal people stepping up to defend normal people and joining incidentally” characters.
I don’t knock engage in this aspect, personally, because the core gameplay is some of the strongest in the series, but it’s definitely an aspect the series _needs_ to address in future or else it’ll suffer badly for it.
10:43 previous games had no or little voice acting. Fates and awakening only had full voice acting in important moments or cutscenes. Fire emblem 8 and prior was sprites so it was less effort adding in optional content
What do mean "3 houses barely have any real recruits". You can literally recruit most students and most of the monastery staff members
😢 I miss when we used to have interesting characters that we encounter in the world dealing with their own problems and get around a map to recruit them.
I agree with the retainer problem. Very boring.